The Wolves Eat Well This Year
by TobyKikami
Summary: It's 1940, and the death toll of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union continues to mount. A lost cub in the Red Army undergoes his First Change and finds himself at the mercy of Finnish Garou, contending with a destiny he doesn't want.
1. White Death

**Disclaimer:** Well, I've been spotty with these, but I felt like one today. Anyway, to state the obvious - the Old World of Darkness and associated thingamabobbers aren't mine.

**Author's Notes and Warnings:** I'm finally setting this monster loose on the world. Constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. Preemptive apologies for any historical inaccuracies or other fail. Also, I am interested in knowing how coherent this is for people who aren't as familiar with the Winter War, as well as whatever else you'd like to mention.

Contains violence and language, references to rape and torture, internalized homophobia and other values dissonance. On a lighter note, some bizarre but hopefully discreet shout-outs. Please note that the views of these characters certainly don't always match my own.

* * *

**Chapter One: White Death**

_Area of Ladoga-Karelia, Finland, February 1940_

"A bear," Kalle insisted back at camp while the motti was being mopped up, his hands still shaking around his coffee. "Great fucking hulk three meters high, white as the fucking snow, roaring away in my face. A fucking bear!"

"Didn't know we had white bears hereabouts, city boy."

"Sure it wasn't maybe a runaway tank or something?"

"Sure it wasn't a Russkie with a blanket on his head?"

"Fuck you, Makela. You see it close as I did, you'd be singing another tune."

"Huh, the bears are conked out roundabout now, I'd think. Especially with this winter as it is."

"Yeah, well, you go say so to that bear."

"You find it for me, I'll do that."

Hours later, Kalle fell asleep still trying to sort things out. There _had_ been a Russian, or at least a Red Army man, one of the ones who'd managed to escape the motti, stumbling aimlessly in the woods with a rifle on his back, oblivious to Kalle getting into position and taking aim. When he'd fired the man had reeled, clapping his hands to his chest, and looked toward him. And then, he could remember, there'd been a bear, _right there,_ all white fur and claws and snarls - where had it come from, and what had become of the Russkie? Hell if he knew - and then he'd spun and skied pell-mell until he flew into the camp, nearly bowling over a girl from the Lotta Svard.

It had to have been a bear. What else could it have been?

* * *

Aleksandr would suppose later that he'd dreamed of the encirclement so much in the time immediately afterward because the deepest submerged parts of him refused to believe he'd finally left it.

In his dreams all over again the rations gave out and they started killing the horses. Horses whinnied and shied from him, so he hadn't gotten the job. The job went to farm boys like Kuzin and Marchuk. He watched them get ready and he thought of shoving them aside, leaping on the horses and tearing out the throats (the horses' throats, not Kuzin and Marchuk's. He hoped) with his teeth. The twitching meat, the warm blood. It was a strange thought, to be sure, if not a completely insane one. He'd had many such strange thoughts of late. The horses were probably right to fear him.

Another strange thought was when he looked out at the thick Finnish forest, past the stalled tanks, and wondered what it would be like to run straight into it. In the same class of thought as an inexplicable but resistible impulse to stick his hand into a stove; in this cold it would be far more reasonable to hanker after the stove. He plagued himself with imagining what it would be like to flounder in the snowdrifts between the pines until caught by a cuckoo or worse.

Or worse: the whispers that passed among the huddled knots of men crouched and shivering. They didn't whisper _at_ him, mostly, but they didn't exclude him from the knots. So he listened, his hands twisting around each other to work up the warmth his thin mittens didn't give, and he heard about the frozen corpses the White Finns left propped up next to camp in the night, to be found when the dawn broke over another too-brief day. Never saw, didn't try to see, but heard about the bodies without ears noses eyes tongues hands -

_Some of them, pants at their ankles and cocks chopped -_

What? Fuck!

Fuck is right. Fuck!

Fascists. Typical - Golubev stopped short, put his hand up near his mouth. Aleksandr shuddered. He was thinking, and maybe the others were too, thoughts like chain links: if the White Finns were fascists and the fascists fucked other men as part of their general depravity (_don't think of Lev Isayev, don't, nothing_ happened), then what the White Finns might do to prisoners -

Malinovsky, their political officer, talked often about what the White Finns did to prisoners, though he never went _there_ - stayed with mainstays like noses and ears, talked of how easily sharp Finnish knives could do those things. He talked about those things even more often as days and then weeks passed, reminding them there were worse ways to die. He'd frightened Aleksandr from the beginning, beyond his usual fears, with the sharp edges in his face and his voice. Near the end Aleksandr started to think Malinovsky might also be frightened. After all, he was as trapped as any of them. But what difference did it make if he was, beneath all his edges? It did nothing for Aleksandr's fears.

In his dreams, too, there were also Golubev's whispers in the long nights pressed together for warmth, the ones meant for him alone. _Comrade? Am I bothering you?_

Oh no, you're not.

That's good. 

At first, before the encirclement, Golubev's determined talking had made Aleksandr nervous and longing and guilty and then nervous twice over. If nothing else at least the heightened fear cut it off by crowding out any longings of that sort. Golubev had said all the main things by now, and gotten the main things out of Aleksandr, besides those main things like the encirclement that were so _obvious_ that there was no point in talking about them anymore and crushing what little was left of morale - by now even the reassurances that reinforcements would break through just underlined how very much it hadn't happened so far. Golubev realized this, so now it was down to subjects like, of all things, their favorite ice creams. Golubev liked chocolate, Aleksandr said cherry which was the only kind he'd had, and here there was a fracture in the dream because for a moment they were each holding a bar of it. Aleksandr took a bite and it melted tastelessly before it touched his tongue, especially ridiculous in this weather. He tried again and this time it tasted like meat broth when melted, nothing at all like cherry, but he wasn't about to complain and broth was more nourishing anyway. Golubev licked at his ice cream and smiled like he had in those heady early days of the war.

_Let's do our best, comrade, so the fascists never clap eyes on Leningrad. _

Inside these dreams he dreamed, also, of what he'd dreamed _then_. He'd dreamed he was a wolf, at ease in the forest. He dreamed he was the one to howl his pursuit, part of a pack that rushed across the snow and ran down hapless prey. He dreamed of the meat in his mouth, the blood scattered in the snow.

The memory of his fears rose. The dreams transformed around them, dissolved into screams and shots. Then he ran, then he floundered between the pines after all, thinking that surely he wasn't the only one to get through the Finnish cordon except it looked like it from here, then he was falling back against a trunk feeling like he'd been kicked in the chest - then, in what moonlight filtered through those pines, his mittens came away from his chest glistening with his own blood.

His hands bare, still sticky. On his knees, snow crunching beneath him. The wind, through the trees, slicing him to bone. The wolves howling. If only he had a wolf's pelt.

Overhead, a bird circling among the trees. He stumbled after it.

* * *

Half-awake, Aleksandr at first took the warmth as a sign that he was done for.

He lay there a while longer, listening to his own breath, waiting for everything to dwindle. When it didn't, he began to take stock, keeping his eyes closed.

He could feel fingers, toes, a soft weight over him, a similar softness below. A nest (he thought again of birds), or a cocoon, blankets, maybe furs. Beneath them, he could feel he was naked. Above them, his head was bare of everything but what hair had grown in since the last shearing. Where... and what...?

_Bringing up a bloody hand, picking a swatch of fabric from his shoulder. Felt like it might be a bit of his uniform jacket. Another, another. Everything in fragments. _

A soft scraping. The smell of smoke. Not very heavy, but close. Aleksandr inhaled and opened his eyes.

Through the haze of smoke near the rough, blackened wooden ceiling, he could make out a patch of sky. The walls were similarly rough. A peasant's cottage, maybe.

He'd heard how over twenty years ago the Finnish peasants and workers had risen up and been crushed by the Whites and languished under redoubled oppression ever since. Now that they were coming in, he'd heard, the proletariat would rise up and meet them halfway with gratitude and jubilation. He hadn't seen any grateful and jubilant proletariat - maybe they were somewhere else being crushed all over again. He hadn't actually seen any White Finns, for that matter, but they left unmistakable signs of their presence.

_A shape, between the trees, not in them, the glint of the rifle, and he lifted a hand in its bloody mitten, lifted it as though he could catch bullets, mouthed "No" as if he'd be heeded, as if it mattered if he was, but it didn't matter twice over because all that came out was more blood, brief warmth against his chin and throat. _

But was that dreaming?

Slowly, beneath the blankets, Aleksandr moved one hand to his bare chest. No bandage. No pain. He prodded - it wasn't even tender.

Not possible.

He picked his way backward. The part where someone held his head up and poured something warm down his throat might or might not be a dream. The part before that where he was a wolf, running through the snow after a bird, howling for someone anyone - that was a dream, of course, a variation on an old theme. The part before that, when he stood bloodied and half-naked in the snow - a dream, too, even if it would do a little to explain why his clothes were entirely missing now, because why would he be so bloodied unless he'd been shot? Which couldn't have happened unless he'd stayed dreaming, stayed mad even, for long enough for the wound to heal.

But he was out of the encirclement, that was for certain, unless these were the vivid dreams that came with freezing to death. Taken in by Finnish peasants, maybe. And he wasn't tied up, that could be a good sign. And he was alive to breathe and think and be perplexed, like so many other men probably weren't.

The scraping continued, to his right. He took the hand from his chest and put it outward to the left until his palm flattened against the wood of the wall. Then he turned his head to the right.

A heavy stone stove in the opposite corner fumed smoke. Someone crouched before it, back to him, wearing a hooded white coat Aleksandr envied, doing something with their hands. Carving, maybe. Aleksandr could make out the large sheath at the belt. When he craned his neck he could also make out the door on the wall between them.

Aleksandr lowered his head, watched, listened. Something more had to happen, eventually, but he didn't want to provoke it, and even after however long asleep he was still tired. It wasn't long before the scraping lulled him back into the dreams of wolves.

* * *

Footsteps echoed through the dreams, over the sound of the wolf's paws in snow, and the next time he opened his eyes someone stood over him. The same person who'd been in front of the stove, he thought. The same coat. A half-carved block of wood in one hand, a vicious-looking knife to match the sheath in the other. Now Aleksandr saw how young he looked. Sixteen, maybe, which was Fyodor's age.

Fyodor, and from there Mikhail. He tried to breathe steady.

The boy began to talk at him. Finnish? No idea. But then he began to grunt and growl and bark, which Aleksandr didn't think could be Finnish, though it didn't shake another strange feeling - that he ought to understand more of this dogs' language than he did.

Eventually the boy snorted, looking contemptuous. He took a few steps back, threw open the door, yelled outside as Aleksandr turned to keep his eyes on him. The yelling turned into an exchange with someone out there, back and forth in what he thought was Finnish. The wood disappeared into a coat pocket for long enough for him to exchange it with something he threw at Aleksandr.

Aleksandr got a hand out of the blankets and picked it up where it had landed. It turned out to be a hunk of dense dark brown bread that looked like rye. "Thank you." He wasn't sure if he spoke too soft or too loud.

The boy snorted again as he retrieved the wood. He went back to the stove, sat down facing him, and resumed his carving.

Time passed. Aleksandr lay on his side eating the bread, cupping one hand to catch crumbs. The boy paid him little attention. Aleksandr finished the bread, nipped the crumbs from his hand, and kept lying there. He wanted to look back to the ceiling, but he had to watch for cues.

Another yell from outside. The boy stood, barked, a word this time - "Ivan!" - and beckoned him up with a peremptory gesture.

The bread had been encouraging; the demeanor wasn't. Aleksandr sat up, holding the blankets up to his neck. Despite the stove, the air chilled his back. He pulled some of the blankets so that they wrapped around his shoulders and over his head, extricated his feet and swung them to the earthen floor. Then he pushed himself up with one hand, holding his makeshift cloak closed with the other.

The boy walked to the door and beckoned again. The wood went back into a pocket, the knife into the sheath, but he kept his hand on that knife. Aleksandr staggered toward him, rediscovering his gait as he went. He glanced around in case there was a pair of shoes he'd overlooked, his uniform folded in a corner, and found nothing besides what he'd already seen.

Outside snow was thick on the ground and shifted beneath Aleksandr's bare feet. At least it wasn't that far to walk through what Aleksandr saw now was a forest village of some kind. More of those old-fashioned log cottages tucked between the trees, and by the time they stopped at one with a railed wooden deck and a chimney three more boys had wandered over and were in involved conversation in probably-Finnish with the first. The first seemed to be the oldest and largest of them; the smallest looked maybe eleven, twelve. They all stared at him, but the stare of the smallest was different. Where the other two seemed as contemptuous as the first, this one seemed fascinated.

Were all the men at war then, Aleksandr wondered.

It was still a strange feeling, in a different way, to count himself as a man. They weren't that many years younger, after all. And they were boys but in some way they cowed him nonetheless.

The first boy gestured again. He walked up the steps, crossed the deck, and was greeted by heat when he opened the door.

Inside, it turned out to be a steam bath, ready to use, not as up to date as the kind he'd been to at home but he hadn't been in Leningrad for a long time, or for that matter to a banya. Another good sign? He shed the blankets onto the deck, feeding them through the half-open door, and closed the door behind him while his numbed feet and face stung with the warmth. Once seated, he looked down at himself and was surprised; he'd expected, even in the poor light, to look dirtier. Maybe they'd scrubbed him off when he was unconscious. There wasn't a trace of blood. He leaned back, head falling to the side, and drifted. He didn't sleep again, quite, but for a while he went slack. For a few seconds in this slackness and this warmth he could almost forget what had preceded this, and what might follow. Then he set about figuring out how things worked in this old style - ladling water onto the stones for steam and so on.

When he emerged, he saw two of the boys perched on the railing, facing away and continuing to talk. The blankets were gone; boots with socks stuffed in their tops and a stack of clothes sat in their place on the deck. Underwear on top, and was that a coat folded at the bottom? In the order he'd put them on. That was thoughtful. He reached for them, glanced down again, and stopped with his arm out.

In good light, cleaned off, he could see the scar on his chest, round and pink. He touched it with his fingertips; now that he knew where it was he could feel that it was smoother than the skin around it.

He was quite sure he hadn't had it before. Where would he have gotten it?

_It wasn't a cuckoo in a tree, but still - _

He ran a hand through his hair. It felt about as long (or short, really) as it had the last he remembered. Maybe a little longer, but he'd worn his hat nearly all the time, to catch the warmth. He couldn't remember what the rate was supposed to be. Then he reviewed what growth there was on his chin and such - little difference there, either. But if he'd been unconscious long enough for a gunshot wound to scab over and heal...

It wasn't getting any warmer. He snatched up the underwear - flannel, soft in his hand - and began to pull it on.

In short order he'd covered the scar with layers of shirt and undershirt and a baggy sweater. The clothes matched his height but not, for the most part, his breadth - or rather, his lack thereof. Like his father, he'd always been skinny, and his belt had tightened a notch or two more in the last few months. When only the coat seemed to be left, he turned his attention to the socks and the boots. The boots were a little large but the thickness of the socks helped; he determined after a few steps that they weren't going to fall off. Once he picked up the coat, he saw the items below it. Gloves, a scarf, and - incongruous in its familiarity - his hat, the budenovka with the pointed tip and the large red star.

He slipped on the coat and picked up the hat. The earflaps were down; on closer examination, the buttons to fasten them up to the sides or under the chin were missing. Better than nothing. He pulled it on and started fastening the coat.

The boys had turned around on the railing. The smallest, and one of the ones in between. They watched him in the same ways they had before.

"Thank you," he said again, and managed a smile.

The older boy frowned. The smallest smiled back. Aleksandr bent to pick up the gloves and slipped them on; when he picked up the scarf they pushed themselves off the railing and the older boy beckoned him onward. He followed, still winding the scarf.

This time they came to a larger building. Inside, the logs of the walls were covered with carvings - repeated symbols that looked like they might be writing akin to Chinese. Aleksandr could comprehend it about as well as Chinese, but again there was the feeling that he _ought_ to. One of those which appeared frequently along the lines looked like a curved cousin of the German swastika, but did that mean anything? He couldn't stare at it too long - there were the people inside to consider.

If what he'd seen so far was a good sampling, most of the men _were_ away. There was one man who looked to be in his forties or fifties, the yellow hair around his intense face lined with silver. His clothing was edged with fur and stitched with more of the symbols, including the swastika's cousin. The same went for the sheath of the knife at his belt, and there was the hint of still more on its handle. A wolf stood at his side.

A wolf? His imagination was taking strange turns. Why would a wolf be in here? It was a dog, that was all. Dogs could look like wolves. After all, they could _mate_ with wolves. The Finns could keep dogs like that for hunting and so on. And besides, the closest he'd come in Leningrad was pictures, and the closest he'd come after _that_ was the howls in the forest night; what did _he_ know about wolves?

Still, he watched it watching him and couldn't _really_ think of it as anything other than a wolf.

There was another such, wandering around behind the man and his companions - two women, dressed similarly down to the knives. They looked at him, then at each other.

The man stepped forward and talked at him as the boy had, for longer. Probably-Finnish, then the dogs' language (the wolves' language? The whatever-it-was beside the man seemed from the noises it made almost as though it was making its own contributions to the conversation), then two more sequences of words, with significant pauses in between. He thought he caught _Deutsch?_ at one point, so the man was probably trying German then, but that knowledge was little help, and knowing that the man spoke German before he spoke Russian wasn't a comfort. Aleksandr remembered some of the English from school but if the man spoke it himself, he thought, the man would try it himself, which he didn't.

After the fourth try, the man let out a breath fast and sharp. He glanced between the women. One of them cleared her throat and said, "Russian."

He wasn't sure at first whether she wanted an answer. When no one said anything for a while he said, "Yes."

This didn't bring forth another series of words, ones he could understand. They only led to muttering among the three, with periodic additions from the wolves. When he looked along the lines of symbols again he saw the four boys assembled behind him, the same looks on their faces.

The same woman as before said, "You. Silver Fang?"

Should I know what that means? he thought, and was answered by another strange feeling that indeed he should. This time he voiced it. "I'm sorry."

More conversation. The man spoke. "You. Garou?"

More mystifying chords struck. Had the man said that word before, _Garou_? "I'm sorry."

The woman said, "Wolf. Man." She gestured, up and down. "Man. Wolf. You change?"

"I'm sorry. I don't understand." He cast about. The only word of Finnish he knew was _Suomi_, their own name for it, like in the marching song: _meet us, Suomi the beautiful, decorated with transparent lakes._ Would he dare to sing at them and hope they understood the sentiment? Absolutely not. Instead he tried a bit of English, once again "I'm sorry. I don't understand?" This got no more reaction than the Russian.

"Wolf kin?"

"I'm sorry."

The man closed the distance between them in a blink. Without the flaps buttoned, the budenovka came off easily in the man's hand. He put his other hand underneath Aleksandr's chin, forcing his head up. This close, looking him in the face was like staring into an open furnace from five centimeters, or a wolf's open maw from the same, and Aleksandr's gaze soon dropped downward, to the side, as far as he could with the thick fingers curling in on his jaw.

Aleksandr didn't understand any more of what the man snarled now than he had before, but it could be nothing good. Swastikas. Things had switched around last summer, but had they changed that much? He realized he was trembling when his tremors came up against the man's tightening grip. His eyes shut. He wished himself in Leningrad. His mother and aunt coming in from the kitchen with the soup, cousin Yulia helping Fyodor with his homework, Mikhail making their day sound exciting even though Aleksandr could remember it perfectly well.

The man snarled another phrase and shoved him backward. He stumbled, barely kept his feet, and barely caught his budenovka when the man flung it at him. He clutched it, not daring to put it on, until the woman who spoke bits of Russian came up and led him out past the stares of the boys.

* * *

At least they still fed him: more bread and a thick soup with meat in it. The woman had given it to him in a wooden bowl and looked away when he said thank you. The women seemed less harsh with him than the man, but that wasn't saying much. He trembled then with immense relief; if they were feeding him they weren't going to kill him. At least, not yet.

He tilted the bowl to drink the soup, then used the bread to wipe up the traces that refused to flow downward. When he ran out of bread he tilted the bowl again and licked up what remained. The woman nodded at him and showed him to a latrine outside, as rough-hewn as the rest of the place but he wasn't going to complain. Now he knew two words of Finnish: _Suomi_ and what he supposed meant something like latrine. When she led him back to the cottage and shut him inside, he supposed she'd taught him the word so that he could tell his guard (too soon to assume jailer, he told himself) when he needed to go.

He took off the boots and lined them up next to the bed before climbing inside the nest. Another small luxury, that he could do this without courting frostbite. He could be grateful for that. He lay staring up at the ceiling, leaving the nest for intermittent exercises whenever the stillness started to bother him, and concentrated on how grateful he was.

Night was falling when the smallest of the boys slipped inside, holding another wooden bowl. Aleksandr looked up, sat up. The boy tilted his head, frowned, tilted it back upright, smiled again, raised a hand. "_Terve_."

With that smile it probably didn't mean fuck you. "_Terve_," he tried in return.

The boy smiled wider. He walked over and made as if to clamber onto the bed. Then he stopped, looked at the boots, set the bowl on the bed, and bent over to unlace his own. By the time he was done, Aleksandr had moved back to make room for him and gotten a look inside the bowl - water. Another smile as he leapt onto the bed, perched on his knees. He produced a small mirror and a razor blade and held them out.

Aleksandr took them. "Thank you."

The boy sat watching with his head tilted; Aleksandr supposed this, at least, could be fascination with something he couldn't do yet rather than fascination with the "Ivan." He tried not to let it bother him while he shaved. He hadn't for a while, to keep another thin shield against the cold, but he wouldn't need that anymore, could he? The frame of the mirror had beautiful patterns worked into the wood; he could feel them beneath his fingers as he held on to it, and he spent a minute examining them after he finished. It seemed old, but as solid as a mirror could be.

He held the razor for another stretch of time. It looked pathetic compared to the knives, but it might conceivably make a weapon. But did he need a weapon? If he really had anything to fear from these people, why had they given it to him to begin with?

It was with this thought that he finally pushed the bowl and tools over to the boy. The boy nodded at them, frowned again in apparent concentration, and then looked up and jabbed his finger toward his own throat.

"Veikko," he said now, slow and loud. "Veikko." He pointed toward Aleksandr. "Ivan?"

He understood, almost smiled, and pointed at himself. "Aleksandr." He pointed back. "Veikko?"

A broad grin. Pointing back and forth, "Veikko. Aleksandr." Another tilt of the head. "Yes?"

"Yes."

"Ivan. No?"

"No."

Back and forth again, and again. When later one of the other boys yelled for Veikko, Aleksandr finished his handful of words with the Finnish for goodbye, or good night. One of those.

* * *

Heikki threw his arm out. The other one held his bundle of wood. It was much more wood than Smallest-Of-Litter carried; Heikki was the oldest, the largest, the strongest of their pack. Smallest-Of-Litter's father said Smallest-Of-Litter would be bigger than that, someday. Smallest-Of-Litter thought Heikki would be bigger than _that_. "And Ivan in there -"

"Aleksandr."

"What?"

"His name," said Smallest-Of-Litter, hurrying to keep up. "Aleksandr. Not Ivan. I asked him, he said Aleksandr. He said Ivan to you?"

Heikki stared at him and then started to laugh. He kept laughing as they neared where Kalevi and Olavi were taking apart their kills and putting them on fire that needed feeding. Smallest-Of-Litter was used to them laughing like that, about human things he still didn't understand.

"You ask your dad," said Heikki at last, and he was shaking his head like they did when he didn't understand something humans always knew. "Ask Ilmari-rhya."

When they were there Marita and Aili sat next to Smallest-Of-Litter's father. Aili held a thin piece of paper. A little while ago Aili taught Smallest-Of-Litter another human way of saying Yes and No, the way Aleksandr knew. "This looks like the birthdate," said Aili. "The fourth of some month in 1920."

Smallest-Of-Litter's father grunted and watched Smallest-Of-Litter's rabbits on the fire.

"We can make up a chart," she said, "and once Elias knows the month -"

"You do what you want," said Smallest-Of-Litter's father.

"As far as that, I could still at least send a message to the -"

"You know what they'll say," said Smallest-Of-Litter's father. "They'll be even worse than the Children of Gaia for it. Fuck that." Which meant he probably didn't want Aili to do exactly what she wanted. He turned to Smallest-Of-Litter, who was setting down his wood. "Veikko."

Veikko Ruotsalainen was his name for humans. He'd remembered that, and used it. His father was human-born and liked it when he used it, and Smallest-Of-Litter liked it too, more than being Smallest. The Warder Wind-In-Trees had a name for humans too, Ritva: that was a kind of tree. Answers-Storm thought there was no sense in it so she didn't have one.

He said, "Heikki says to ask..." Behind him he could hear Heikki starting to laugh again, and putting a hand over it.

He asked, and his father answered. He still didn't understand, quite. But he did understand that something about Aleksandr Not-Ivan made his father angry. It was all mixed up with the Silver Fangs far away, he understood that a little bit too, and with human things-like-tribes, and with why Elias and Jalmari and Ilmari the Tireless (who wasn't Smallest-Of-Litter's father, who was Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm) were away now. They were human-born and men and not too old so they were fighting a _war_, another one, where they didn't cut down the Wyrm but humans. Though the Wyrm hid behind it all, his father said. Smallest-Of-Litter didn't think he meant they hid behind Elias and Jalmari and Ilmari.

If the Wyrm hid behind Aleksandr, thought Smallest-Of-Litter, eating his share of rabbit the human way, by now his father would've cut him up and then cut up the Wyrm behind him too. So it couldn't be that.

He let his father's words sit in his head like the rabbit sat in his stomach. He began with the least of his questions. "Like a tribe. I am Finnish too?"

"You're my son," said his father. "Of _course._"

* * *

Elias Laukkanen had left bait for incoming dove-spirits in a pocket of his coat so as to keep any messages from the sept from materializing in his hand in front of humans; he knew one had come in when the weight of the bait vanished while he was on night patrol. Together with Tapio he made the usual circuit around the motti - no signs of attempted escape - and shot an officer in the head. Tapio noted another kill.

Back at camp, sitting between Kustaa and Tapio in the dugout, he extracted the folded vellum and refreshed his spirit-bait while dreaming up cover stories.

Aili's handwriting: _We have a stray Russian, probably a lost cub, will send him over. Found just inside the bawn, no mark, no High Tongue. The boys have details, will howl in a few days. Use your discretion. Veikko says his name is Aleksandr._

"Perkele," breathed Elias. A nice feature of his native language, side effect of the long-ago proselytizing efforts of the White Christ, that he could readily invoke the Old Man of the sky with no one the wiser. Not like in, say, Sweden, Germany even with that "ethnic revival" the Fenrir there were keeping an eye on (some were saying it was revived the same way a leech was revived), where swearing by Thor would stick out if anyone happened to listen. Wouldn't blow the Veil to tatters, nothing like that, but it might set people wondering, and enough of that wondering might set off something more, and that something might set off something else, and...

Kustaa stirred. He'd been slumped against the skin-lined wall, glassy-eyed but nevertheless taking everything in - like his father did, though Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm had long ago lost all glassiness except what came in shards. "What is it?"

"Yeah," Tapio whispered, "what?" He was in the steady and perpetual process of emptying and reorganizing his pockets. Tapio's pockets were always filled with miscellany, ranging from handkerchiefs to extra gun oil to pennies, though on patrols and sniping runs he forewent the clinkables.

They were both Kin (and Tapio his cousin to boot), and he'd probably have to ask for their help, so he told them while methodically shredding the vellum. "Explains that noise," he added. He remembered the distant demented howls from an unknown throat a couple nights back. He thought he might have heard hints of the Garou language, more than one would find with a regular wolf, but mostly it came off as garbled, lunatic. Maybe just completely lost.

"Don't you have a cousin called that?" said Tapio, a cousin from the opposite side of the family. Tapio's sister Marita was his packmate. Before Elias's own sister got married and moved west they'd made a nice matched quartet.

"Right," said Elias. Aleksandr, Alexander, Aleksanteri. His American cousin Alex, the son of his father's brother. Alex wrote letters in painstaking amateur German; so far Finnish daunted him. Ideally, he supposed with some idleness, Fenrir should be daunted by nothing, but Alex was Kin and fifteen so he could have a little slack and it wasn't like most of their tribemates in neighboring countries (like Russia, ouch) made much more of an effort. Anyway, Elias's German wasn't much better, so he wrote back with it and they muddled along all right. Coincidence, but there might be some kind of angle there. He stood. "Off to Captain."

Captain Jokela received him in the evacuated house commandeered as headquarters. The captain was Kin too, of the Children of Gaia, plenty of guts, so favored by his own Garou cousins that he even knew a watered-down healing Gift, so he knew enough for Elias to explain they'd be expecting a prisoner of war soon.

Because with things how they were, the war on and everything, and Elias in if not the thick of it (that would be southward, he thought, at the Isthmus) in the middling of it, what else could they pass off a Russian cub as?

Back in the dugout he used a lantern, the light carefully directed, to review the crumpled little sketches he kept in the sleeve of his sweater. Toivo Jarvinen had done them when Elias visited Tampere last summer, ever the opportunist, in exchange for the spare markka in his pockets. Other soldiers might carry photographs, but Elias liked being different. And in case he ran into any sticklers, ink drawings had less of the Weaver and were more permissible to dedicate. Heads and torsos. Marita, looking up at unseen sky - back at the sept. Their packmate Ilmari, concentrating on an unseen project - stationed at another motti. His sister Helena, holding an indeterminate bundle of typically-indeterminate baby - out west. Kolya Rybalkin, looking up from a book of indeterminate purpose - some interpreting job behind the lines. Toivo himself, quite an honest self-portrait - where _was_ he now? They'd had to have found something to do with his reserves unit.

He shuffled them and wondered what made them think the Russian, this Aleksandr, was a cub, a Garou at all. This wasn't a priority in Aili's limited space. Not that he doubted, but it was a matter of curiosity. Maybe he'd turned up with his clothes in a familiar pattern of shreds, having abruptly outgrown them with his Firsting. Maybe he might have, if not High Tongue, some precaution - say, a piece of paper with a few glyphs scrawled on. With things in Europe as they were, more Garou were teaching their Kin and cubs pieces of the written language - we might be at war, such a paper might say held high in the face of Crinos, but there's a bigger war where we're on the same side. Maybe he had the look of one tribe or another, a look so burned into his blood by centuries of breeding that even before his Rite of Passage other Garou could see it. If so, it was probably Fenrir blood. Otherwise he'd surely have been shunted off by moon bridge to the tribe in question; Shadow Lords and Silver Fangs and Children of Gaia all had Russians in Scandinavian exile, Elias knew. Other tribes, not quite as easy to get hold of, but they could surely send him to the Children of Gaia anyway; the Children of Gaia would readily trawl for Fianna or whatnot.

Though maybe it was the look of the Black Furies? That'd be hilarious. The Furies had been in Russia in some numbers and their Kin wouldn't have been in as much of an eggs-in-one-basket situation as the Silver Fangs' were. The Furies wouldn't have wanted him anyway, him being a _him_, so Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm might have taken it into his head to do some poaching. Elias liked this idea too much and tried not to convince himself of it, otherwise he could imagine his own disappointment if Aleksandr's coat turned out to be solid Fenris-gray instead of Fury-black - and realize how stupid that disappointment would be.

The descendants of the Varangian Guard, he remembered. Scattered to the winds with the revolutions there, fighting in the civil war and being pushed to the borders while the Silver Fang Kin were running like rabbits, being rounded up and shot.

Likely this Aleksandr was old, for a cub. Aili hadn't said how old, for whatever reason including not knowing or not enough space. But if he was Russian he'd probably come into Finland with the Red Army, and the Red Army probably wasn't yet recruiting as young as Elias himself had been when he Firsted.

Not far away great clusters of Red Army starved and froze in mottis, refusing surrender, fighting to the last bullet and then to their bayonets, and now one was dropped right into his hands to keep safe and educate and blah-de-blah-dah. He could appreciate the conjunction.

When he slept, near morning, Elias dreamed of Kolya. He was more inclined than most people to search for substance in his dreams, had been ever since the dreams leading up to his Firsting, but this was simple enough an association to figure out - one Russian and another, and the Rybalkins had taught him things which led to this cub Aleksandr being sent to him now - and he thought little of it afterward, once his fish-gasping stopped.

* * *

Aleksandr dreamed of birds, all kinds of birds. Cuckoos, that was an obvious one, the term for Finnish snipers up in trees chirping bullets. Then pigeons and doves - that was easy to figure out too. Golubev, whose name had "pigeon" in it, who'd tried to be his friend as well as his comrade. They were both from Leningrad, Golubev a little older, but Golubev had volunteered out of university, wanted to do his part to free the Finns. Aleksandr hadn't _not_ wanted to help free the Finns, but by the time that started he'd already been called up so he supposed it didn't matter whether or not he wanted to. Golubev's mother and father were believers from the start; this was why Golubev's given name was Vladimir.

Then ravens, picking at the bodies.

Then birds of prey. Eagles, buzzards, falcons? He couldn't get them straight. In his dreams he ran as a wolf or rode after them on a horse. He'd never been on a horse in his life (hard enough to get near one) but his dreams readily conjured the sensation. He rode through the snow and he noticed his clothes were ridiculous, extravagant. Furs and wool were reasonable enough in these winters, but jewels? Silk and velvet embroidered in silver and gold? He'd never felt material like that before but again he had no trouble imagining it.

As a wolf he howled and somehow he said something in the howls. As a human in the too-rich clothes (he thought in these dreams he might also be a woman, something else he had no idea about) he spoke to a gathering of Finnish soldiers, men and women, who carried not rifles but swords and spears and axes and bows (and those same vicious knives at their belts). Tried Russian, that didn't work, tried French (why French? That was another thing), that didn't work either, and so barked at them in the wolves' language.

_Child,_ someone called after him, _child!_

He wanted to scream back, scream for his mother like the child they called him, but even in his dreams he held his tongue.

_Come home,_ called his mother.

When awake, he gathered more names. Aili-rhya, the woman with pieces of Russian. Sofia-rhya, the other woman who'd been with the man whose name he still didn't know. Marita-rhya, a younger woman (but still older than him, he thought) who tended to be with Aili and knew a little English, but not enough to tell him much. The other three boys: Heikki-rhya the first and oldest, Kalevi-rhya and Olavi-rhya in between. There was a lot of rhya, he noticed, which seemed like a suffix of some kind, because Veikko always called the other boys without it. Veikko introduced them when they came to take watch, but when he tried to use their names with them (keeping the rhyas, he didn't feel safe discarding them) they laughed at him and he didn't know why. At least when they laughed they weren't angry.

Veikko taught him the Finnish for up and down, left and right, the bread, the meat, the soup, even the bowls. It was only his third day awake in the village and he was already feeling stronger. They let him eat more on the second and third days. On the second day he was almost sick with how much he ate.

Water, too, in abundance, and Veikko taught him the Finnish for that and for the cups that held it. In the encirclement he wouldn't have thought water would be a problem with all the snow to melt, but some of them had tried that and a few hours later were writhing in the rest of the snow, clutching their stomachs, trying not to throw up what little they'd had.

It was still dark on the fourth day when the boys came in and shook him awake. He put on the boots and they pushed a familiar shape into his hands - his field bag, he found, how long had they had it? - gesturing, he thought, for him to put it on. He'd barely slung it over his shoulder before the one he thought was Kalevi held out a strip of cloth. He said something to Veikko, readily identified as the smallest shape.

"Down," said Veikko, and leaned slightly forward to demonstrate. Aleksandr guessed why: Kalevi was considerably shorter than him, and with him standing upright it would be difficult for Kalevi to reach his face and behind his head to tie on the -

No. They couldn't _now_ be...?

He stumbled back against the bed. The boys were silent for a moment before breaking into a clamor. He felt himself shake his head, so frantic his eyes nearly rattled in their sockets. Pathetic - why should they terrify him? If he really thought they were taking him to his death why didn't he fight? There might be four of them but they were all younger than him, he was taller than even Heikki, and if he just got hold of one of their knives then he could well -

But now that he thought of it, _did_ he think that? If they were going to blindfold him to kill him why did they give him his bag beforehand? Just to carry it out to his grave, if there would be a grave? He couldn't be sure. And he couldn't set on them, these boys younger than Fyodor, when he didn't know that they meant any such thing.

Maybe that was why they gave him the bag, to confuse him. Maybe they were counting on that.

They'd pressed closer and he was still shaking his head when Veikko elbowed his way between two of them. "No," said Veikko, "no." And something else, words he didn't know. Veikko grabbed the strip of cloth and came closer, holding it up as far as he could, saying those words. The others fell silent, looking on.

Eventually Aleksandr stopped shaking his head. He stayed where he was for a while, leaning backward, his hands out behind him curling into the blankets. Veikko waited, hands high, repeating himself.

If they killed him now, Aleksandr thought, it would be an especially pathetic death. But he straightened, closed his hands, and bent forward. His limited sight vanished. He felt Veikko knot the cloth at the back of his head. Then one of Veikko's small hands closed around his wrist and tugged him forward. He began to walk.

* * *

At the bottom of the blindfold, things lightened with the day. They walked through snow, turning often. Sometimes he bumped into a tree. Two of the boys had fallen away from the group while they were still in the village, with what he supposed were goodbyes. Veikko still held his hand, guiding him, saying "left" and "right." He thought the other boy was Heikki, but he wasn't quite sure.

At some point suddenly everything seemed louder - the snow beneath their boots, Veikko's directions, the calling of birds. Not long after that, they stopped. Veikko's other hand took the small loose end of the scarf (he'd wound it over his head, under the budenovka, for a little more warmth) and tugged. Aleksandr bent his head again, hope squirming in his gut. Veikko undid the blindfold.

When it came off he saw that he'd guessed right that the other boy was Heikki. Then he saw his rifle, or one very much like it, its bayonet attached, in its sling on Heikki's back. Heikki carried a bag, too, with a canteen tied to it, and Aleksandr was reminded that he hadn't had a chance to look in his own. He didn't get a chance now, either; even while he blinked in the light, Heikki directed them onward.

Not so many twists and turns now. Just the thick forest, and the snow, and the cold. It wasn't as bad as it might have been, not with all the thick winter clothes he had now. The boys seemed completely unbothered. They stopped a few times during the day - to break the ice and draw water from a small stream, to eat, to piss against trees. Aleksandr drank the water and ate the bread they gave him. He told himself once again that if they were expending food on him, Heikki was hardly about to shoot him with his own rifle. They just hadn't wanted him to know the way back to the village, though why he couldn't fathom.

Maybe, he thought, they were going to set him loose, and if the White Finns caught him and tortured him he wouldn't be able to lead them back to his helpers. This was a nice idea to think of. He liked to try to believe it. Liked thinking that they were sympathizers after all, that the man who'd grabbed him that day had been angry with something else entirely that, not knowing Finnish, he hadn't understood. And maybe it wasn't his rifle after all, just one like it, it wasn't as if the Mosin-Nagant was rare - a perfectly good reason why they hadn't given it back.

They stopped again after nightfall. Aleksandr began to sort through his bag by feel. There was still no sign of the rest of his uniform. He couldn't find his papers, either. But there was his cartridge belt, alongside the cartridges still in their boxes. What other miscellany he'd picked up. And in addition to this there was a blanket, tightly folded. He took it out at first so he could better search for his papers, and when he still couldn't find them he wound himself in it while wondering if he could fold it that small again. He kept the boots on.

Heikki and Veikko argued briefly, glancing at him throughout. Finally, Veikko indicated that he should stay, shouldn't wander. Aleksandr had no problem not wandering. The next moment, it seemed, a wolf rushed off into the dark beyond his sight.

He stared after it, then at Heikki, leaning against a tree, whose face betrayed no clue. All the while he tried to convince himself he hadn't seen that. He was very willing to believe it, but it remained a struggle. Maybe he was touched in the head. Cracked it on something, the night the encirclement broke. Seeing wolves everywhere, in hunting dogs, in young boys -

He could probably overpower Heikki, take the rifle, take the bag, run - he'd seen the sun set, knew the way east - but how far would that get him?

He curled up inside the blanket, pulling it over his head, and tried not to imagine it wouldn't be enough against the cold. After all, if it wasn't enough, the boys would be as bad off. They lived here. They ought to know what they were doing.

He did his best to ignore the howling; again it followed him into his dreams. It really _was_ getting to him.


	2. Accept an Honorable Surrender

**Chapter Two: Accept an Honorable Surrender**

Veikko was there again when he woke up, nothing more wolfish about him than before. Trick of the light (or the dark), had to be. Some bread, some water, the blanket stuffed back into the bag, and they started walking again. After three days of luxury, Aleksandr's stomach had learned again how to complain of the reduction. He learned again how to ignore it.

After nightfall, they reached a house in a tiny clearing. There was a woman there, with a little boy younger even than Veikko; Heikki ran to her and they talked for a while before she called them all in. They looked a lot like Heikki, Aleksandr noticed - maybe they were his mother, his brother. Also, the woman looked at Aleksandr in much the same way. But she fed him, too, more good heavy food, and he said "Thank you" again.

Veikko nudged him. _"Kiitos."_

_"Kiitos,"_ he repeated. She laughed at that.

The house was more modern than the ones at the village; it had more than one room and wooden floors and a fireplace and a chimney instead of just a hole in the ceiling. After he ate she let him take a spot by the fire. There he undid the scarf, took off the boots and gloves and socks, and checked for frostbite. The little boy watched him do this as Veikko had watched him do other things. Veikko saw this too, and began the pointing routine - "Aleksandr," then pointing to the boy, "Paavo" - before the woman noticed and ushered Paavo away. She was still talking to Heikki when Aleksandr lay down in the blanket, the budenovka and gloves a makeshift pillow; he slept nearly immediately.

* * *

Elias listened attentively and finally heard the howls - Heikki Saarinen and Veikko Smallest-Of-Litter, at the Saarinens' house to the west right now, and he suppressed his disappointment that Marita hadn't been the one picked to ferry the cub. A few hours later that night he took some time off on patrol with Kustaa to howl back. In this way, they arranged a rendezvous at a distance from the camp and the mottis. Captain Jokela was notified, as were Kustaa and Tapio. Tapio would be partnering him again tomorrow. Day patrol, this time. Meeting them halfway, best as they could manage. As he saw to his human charges he listened to howls from Ilmari and then Jalmari at their own camp, expressing intrigue and best wishes.

A rough plan: explanations in the relative privacy of the camp sauna, then more explanations during the captain's "interrogation" with Sergeant Elias Laukkanen, of course, serving as interpreter.

"Anything for me to do?" asked Tapio, cradling his coffee like a newborn.

"I'll tell you if I think of something," said Elias, mentally reviewing the pertinent vocabulary: _volk_ - wolf, _volchonok_ - wolf-cub, _oboroten_ - werewolf...

* * *

The next morning Veikko had gone. Instead a gray wolf (a dog, a _dog_, but he wasn't able to convince himself anymore) waited outside the house and trotted at his side. Aside from being a wolf, it was as friendly as Veikko had been. Aleksandr wondered where the wolf had come from and where Veikko had gone, shoving aside the simplest and most insane answer. He wasn't about to try to ask Heikki, who walked as if trying to pretend he wasn't there.

The blanket was left in the house - Heikki had taken it from him when he started to pack it again. Would he not need it anymore? Was that good or bad?

For a while they took a small trail from the house, but soon they veered off between the trees again, walking eastward. With so much snow on the ground there was little appreciable difference.

Eastward. Just maybe, they were taking him to the border. Maybe his papers had fallen out along the way, or he'd had them out when the last attack came and didn't take them with him in the confusion. Maybe they didn't know that when the Red Army came with tanks and planes it came as friends and liberators - Aleksandr knew there'd been leaflets dropped, by the bushel, but they might not have reached that one little village and he didn't even know if they could read - and were keeping the rifle because they weren't sure he wouldn't shoot them with it. Once they'd proven their good intentions to him, they would give it back. Nice to try to believe that. As long as he could try to believe that...

In his dreams last night, people had bowed to him in the falling snow. Wolves had bowed to him. Massive wolf-men had bowed to him. Insane. Insane.

As far as Aleksandr could tell through the trees, the sun was starting to dip again. His feet hurt. He hadn't gone on a march like this for a while; the encirclement enforced stillness.

The sun had dipped a little further, not yet in the process of setting, when the howling began again. The wolf that couldn't be Veikko threw its head back and howled a reply. The howling continued, intermittently, back and forth, until they entered a small clearing. Heikki stopped walking; Aleksandr followed his lead. The wolf howled once more and fell silent.

They stood with breath pluming until Aleksandr, looking east, saw the pair moving between the trees.

They were on skis, fast when he first saw them but soon slowing, leisurely. Their clothes blending with the snow, rifles belted across their backs, knives at their belts. Shouting - _"Terve! Terve!"_ And he knew. Supposing, really, more supposing, but in his gut he knew: White Finns, all right.

"No. Please, no. Please." Remembered the Finnish Veikko taught him. _"Ei, ei -"_

The wolf was staring at him, its head tilted like Veikko's. Heikki was staring at him too, and he saw not reassurance but confirmation, disgust nearly inked across Heikki's face. That same contempt as on the very first day when he'd spat _"Ivan!"_

He should've known from the start.

He would've known from the start if he wasn't such a coward that he'd rather walk meekly to his death than take a risk, than resist -

Now Heikki turned from him, dismissing him. The wolf ran for the White Finns as they entered the clearing, making noises that sounded happy. Aleksandr thought, a thought that seemed very slow: if he was _ever_ going to resist, now was probably his last remotely viable chance.

At least he was such a coward that Heikki wasn't expecting the kick. He went over so fast that Aleksandr felt correspondingly guilty for it, but he couldn't afford to feel guilty. He might be a boy of Fyodor's age but Fyodor wouldn't have sold him to the Whites. He kicked again before he reached and pulled the rifle from the sling, so fast that the bayonet ripped at Heikki's coat and maybe deeper, then knocked him down with the other end when he tried to rise. No time even to try for the knife. He bolted into the trees again. Directly east wasn't an option. He'd have to circle around and -

He stumbled through the snow and knew he'd never get to that part.

Behind him, a roar, and "Heikki! Heikki!" and more words.

Maybe, he thought, trying to run zigzag, they'd shoot him in the back. At least it would be a quick death.

No bullet, just words. His own name, now, and his own language. Veikko _(Veikko?)_ calling "Aleksandr, Aleksandr!" and someone else, one of the Whites, "Aleksandr, wait! Please wait! Would you please wait?" Why the please?

The words were coming closer. Not fast. Still leisurely. On those skis they could catch up any time, following his footprints.

Aleksandr heard himself pant, half-sobbing. Pain in his side. Exertion, or a bullet he hadn't heard? His bag banged against his other side. He nearly ran into a tree, and when he turned from it his head nearly collided with a low branch.

Cuckoos, he thought, and reached up. He was still carrying the rifle; he used that arm to brace himself, the other to hoist. He half-somersaulted onto the branch, lay half-draped and half-straddling it for a few precious seconds, then tried for one thicker and higher up. That was trickier. He nearly lost the rifle, nearly stuck himself with the bayonet. But he made it, eventually, sobbing all the way now, torn between clutching the rifle and the branch. He wanted to clutch his side, as well, but settled for looking down best as he could. No red bloom on the fabric of the coat, at least. He looked up; the closest branches were too thin to support him and he didn't dare try higher.

He was stranded maybe two meters from the ground and one of the White Finns came to a stop beneath him, looking amused. Aleksandr fumbled with the rifle, trying to shoulder it, thinking any second he'd tip and plummet.

"Kindly calm down," said the White Finn. "Calm down and realize that for you, this war is over."

Shoulder and aim. His marksmanship scores at least had been good. "Go away," he gasped, and knew he'd been heard when the White laughed. He could take as many as he could with him, at least, before the end. Could be one, could be none - maybe the recoil of the first shot would knock him from his perch. If it did, he could hope to break his neck when he hit the ground. He braced himself best as he could and pulled the trigger.

Nothing. Nothing, nothing, and the White was laughing again. Aleksandr pulled open his bag and fumbled one-handed for the cartridges.

"It would be very courteous of you if you eased matters for everyone and came down."

_I'm not that stupid_, he thought, and felt himself flush remembering how stupid he'd been even an hour ago. He got hold of the cartridges and extracted one from the belt.

"It may not seem so, but I am your ally."

He tugged off his left glove with his teeth and held it in his mouth while he reloaded. If the White took his own rifle and shot him now... well, then, he would shoot him. That was it.

"You are aware that that will accomplish nothing?"

He was aware. He was lucky if he managed to get this one. He bit down on the glove - no time to juggle putting it back on - and set the rifle to his shoulder again.

Or maybe he had time after all, because the White wasn't aiming back. If anything he was doing the exact opposite. His rifle was unbelted, laid out in the snow. He'd stepped out of the skis. But no, there was the other White, there was a furious-looking Heikki, there was Veikko again, his eyes big. This White was waving them back.

The tableau gave him brief pause. He might have been tempted to talk to the White some more, but if he let go of his glove now it would probably drop to the ground and he'd lose even the diminishing chance of ever covering his hand. It was already starting to numb.

So much he wanted to ask. About the wolves, even, if he was really going crazy. But he knew what the chances were of getting a truthful answer.

He wondered if the White would draw the knife, stab at his feet as they hung from the branch - the White was fairly short, and couldn't reach most of him.

"Let me ask you," said the White, "if I said that I was a Red, would you come down?"

Aleksandr stared at him. That was good as confirming that he wasn't.

"I thought as much," said the White. "Well then." He sighed from deep in his lungs and began to grow.

Aleksandr's gasp drew the glove deeper into his mouth. He bit down again and fired at the thing with everything from bones to hair to teeth growing and growing and _growing_. In answer, something clawed hot streaks up his throat. He forced it down more out of habit than anything else because it wasn't as if not panicking _now_ would make much of a difference, but it still wouldn't help if he threw himself out of the tree trying to get away.

The monster, the gray-furred wolf-man of his dreams, stood over the branch and snatched at him.

Aleksandr rammed forward with the bayonet, but this fazed it no more than bullets. The massive claws grabbed him, pulled him off the branch, and they were caught briefly in a grotesque half-embrace, his rifle holding them apart, the thing still impaled on the bayonet, but he was close enough to see it salivate. He struggled, lost his grip, fell. The first thing to touch ground was his right ankle, twisting under him. Breath left him when he thumped onto his back. When it came back the first thing he did was scream as the pain came with it, the second thing choke on the glove that muffled his scream.

The thing yanked his rifle from its chest and stood over him. He stared up, coughing, and watched as the flow of blood stopped, as the wounds sealed. He was crazy. He accepted this, and he waited. While he waited he pulled the glove from his mouth and sat up and put the glove back on because he might as well. His ankle burned; his eyes, in comparison, just stung. A bullet dropped into the snow at the thing's massive feet. He saw the knife, still sheathed, still belted at the approximate area of its waist. The belt was longer, that was all, and the knife larger.

He was still staring at them when they became smaller again, and the thing wearing them along with them. Now the White stood there, a little disheveled but grinning, still with the look of a predator (Marshal Mannerheim the tsarist butcher, he remembered hearing, but this was something far more feral, without the form and mechanism of a slaughterhouse), as he set down Aleksandr's rifle and moved closer. "Well then, have you had enough?"

No chance, no chance at all, but if he could at least thrash himself into nothing, leave them nothing except maybe a scar to remember him by, a sign that he'd done _something_ with his life -

Aleksandr waited for him to move closer and grabbed at the knife. He got hold of it, actually pulled it from the sheath before the White slammed into him and bore him back to the ground. What breath he'd regained deserted him again. The White's hands pinned his over his head. He still clutched the knife, useless in this position. His body still tried to struggle, twisting frantically in the range it had under the small but sturdy frame.

"I suppose not," gasped the White, breath warm on Aleksandr's face, sounding gleeful. "Now kindly calm down, calm down, I'll have you know that I can wait on you all day..." The changes began again and once they did Aleksandr lay paralyzed with even fiercer terror.

Up close he had an excruciating view of how that face distorted outward into a muzzle that nearly bumped his nose. He could see, also, part of the transformation of the body around it. He felt the weight on his wrists grow to almost crush them; at least the hind legs moved to either side of his, and now only one great paw was required to hold both his hands. The White had become a massive wolf, maybe twice the size of the one that replaced Veikko (_was_ Veikko?). It didn't snarl or growl but somehow that made it worse.

He wanted to shut his eyes. He wanted to turn his face away. Even when there was nothing to lose he didn't dare. It was fear, not courage, that kept his eyes fixed on the wolf's. Snow ground into his hair, the back of his head; he'd lost his budenovka again in one of the falls. He noticed the mottling of the gray fur, slightly darker patches.

Probably there was no fur beyond a scattering of beard. Probably he was hallucinating.

He couldn't stop believing his hallucinations.

It was clawing up his throat again and he could hardly breathe around it.

The wolf's head was receding, somehow, it wasn't as though Aleksandr's head could move any further away, and the wolf wasn't moving either, not by itself. Maybe Aleksandr was the one receding, into himself, except he felt like he was moving away, like the paw still heavy on his wrists was lightening, not pressing down and inward, maybe like he was leaving his wrists behind, his body behind. Breaking loose, somehow, though loose was not free. A little more and maybe he would spiral out and up, a bird. With these wolf-men about it wasn't impossible that he could at least dream it happening.

_Wolf. Man. Man. Wolf. You change? _

As he left his body behind everything that had tensed began to slacken, from his gut outward. It reached his extremities, pooled at his throbbing ankle. His hands fell open. The knife didn't fall out but lay inert.

The wolf bent down and nuzzled at his cheek and made noises. The White sat up, knife in hand, smiled at him, and said, "That was a pleasant bout." The White's eyes burned. The White's face in the shape of the faces of the boys who chattered about Raisa Pavlovna Isayeva but older, sharper, harsher. The White put the knife away and said, "Have those clothes been dedicated?" The White turned his head and said a question to someone else. The White turned his head back and said, "Never mind. Allow me to see to it."

The White put his hands on Aleksandr's chest.

The White unbuttoned the coat.

The White put his hands on the sweater.

The White put his hands under the sweater.

Aleksandr's mouth moved. His tongue moved. Aleksandr said, "What...?"

The White put his hands under the shirt and said, "If you would rather go naked, then that is your choice."

* * *

_Go naked_ - his own words inspired another jolt. Elias kept his smile on and thanked Fenris (though Fenris probably wouldn't appreciate the thanks, and nor would the Old Man - thank Gaia, then, thank Raven, thank cunning Cuckoo, thank the ever-decorous Snow Queen) that his layers of winter clothes hid his arousal. Thanked Crinos physiology, wolf physiology, Hispo physiology - Crinos was made for fighting not fucking (snickering slanders of the Children of Gaia aside), so the relevant bits weren't exactly on display, and wolves (and Hispo dire wolves, with them) didn't get excited until they'd actually stuck it in. Otherwise his erection would've been flopping around out there to horrify everyone. One thing to know in theory this was all body, nothing of intentions, and another to believe it when it was right there. He wasn't an excitable thirteen anymore, trailing after Kolya Rybalkin like a dog, like a _puppy._

And he thanked Gaia, Raven, Cuckoo, the Snow Queen that it was wilting now. This Aleksandr was still good-looking - the physical parts all still in place, except that ankle - but right now it didn't have nearly the same kick as it did when he was loading the rifle with his fine features grim-set and his mouth full of glove (a mouth full of glove and he _still_ managed to enthrall like that) or making a stubborn try for Elias's puukko. Now he was all submission, spread out with his arms over his head. His pale blue eyes with what seemed like a layer of glass or ice over them. Snow in the scarf, in his hair - extremely short, but thick and dark brown and Elias could imagine what it would look like given the opportunity to grow out.

The shirt, a flannel undershirt, and that was it for the layers on the upper half. Aili or Sofia or Marita had probably done this ritual already, but there was no point in assuming, especially as Heikki and Veikko had no clue whether or not they had. Assumptions led to ruining perfectly good clothes, and awkward questions when it came to getting new ones. This was what he told himself.

Elias pulled out his hands, readjusted Jalmari's gray-and-blue patterned sweater (colors Jalmari's wife liked but Jalmari didn't), closed Marita's coat - he could rebutton later, when he wasn't holding everything for dedication together in his head. He did a pass over Marita's gloves and Ilmari's scarf, while he was at it. The scarf was done by Ilmari's twelve-year-old sister in a garish patchwork of knits; Ilmari's sister was seventeen now and her taste had improved considerably. These clothes weren't anyone's first choice, which was why they were left at the sept in case the dedicated sets were past repair. Not equal contributions by any means - Elias and Ilmari were too short to put in much, as were all the cliath. Though no one but Veikko, he thought, would have been too skinny.

Now he scooted backward and worked downward. The trousers, the belt, and the underpants - up above he'd centered his hand on Aleksandr's chest, but he took care to avoid the cock, went for the leg instead. When his hand settled against the flannel at the hipbone, warmed by the skin underneath it, Aleksandr flinched and let out a keening noise. A bad bruise? "Everything is perfectly in order," he said distractedly. "Everything is perfectly all right." The default state of his Russian was formality - after all he'd learned it on the pretext of communicating with Silver Fang dignitaries.

Speaking of which. Aleksandr had a tribal look after all - not one of the ones he'd judged plausible, but the Silver Fang look. It was this look that convinced Elias he wasn't looking at some random Red Army kid in the throes of Delirium who'd had the bad luck to stumble into the bawn, that he'd been choking down frenzy along with his fear (and his glove). His look had _blazed_ when he was in the tree. All heroic resolve, go out with glory, no surrender.

The problem was when you had "to the death, no surrender" types who ought to be on the same side instead on the opposite ones. That was why surrendering had been in the Litany before Geneva, let alone the Convention, was a twinkle in anyone's eye. Really, other Fenrir might scoff but it was a lucky thing that Aleksandr's resolve had buckled to the right side. His fellows - Elias mulled over this while he moved on to the socks and the boots - they had guts, they held out in the surrounded mottis and fought to the last, only handfuls of prisoners taken out of each of their thousands. While Elias could respect their guts, at least, it also meant that he and his fellows ended up killing them.

And, _there_. The clothes were dedicated to him now, would shift to match him, save on clothing expenses. Elias scrabbled back up to take Aleksandr by the shoulders and draw him to sit up. He stayed where Elias left him, hands splayed in the snow, while Elias took another look at the twisted ankle. "We can repair this." Aleksandr just stared at him. "Or rather, you can repair this. It is very simple, very fast. You saw me heal. You can do the same, because you are, in fact, the same. You are a werewolf. Garou. As I am, and as they are back at the sept."

Still nothing. "I will adjust this now, if you don't mind." Elias took hold of the ankle, put it back in alignment, and was answered by a gasp, slightly parted lips. _Stop thinking about the cub's lips._ "Now then," said Elias, and began. Telling him how to visualize, how to focus.

It wouldn't take. He'd never had charge of a lost cub before, or even your run-of-the-mill cub. He remembered his own lessons on voluntary shifting after Firsting, but he'd been eager, accommodating - at least responsive. Aleksandr sat in the snow and barely twitched.

"I might not be a Red," he said, "but that is of no consequence here. Russian, Finnish, Australian - it does not matter. We are all Garou. There are all manner of things to battle aside from one another."

No result. He looked up and about. Heikki, Veikko, and Tapio had drifted closer, gathered around.

Once Elias looked at him Heikki said, "I'll pull his guts out through his _throat_ -"

The pursuit had been delayed, not that the delay made much difference in the end, by holding down Heikki in Crinos until he snapped out of frenzy. He might be Ahroun to Elias's Ragabash, but Elias was fostern to his cliath, more experienced and better skilled, and he'd restrained him with Veikko's help. Elias wondered if they'd need to do it again.

"- dig out his eyes and feed them to the ravens -"

Maybe a shock would do it where cajoling wouldn't. The First Change itself often came about through anger, fear, pain. If he could call that up again...

"You let your guard down like that you get what you deserve," he told Heikki when the latter paused for breath. But he translated for Aleksandr. "Heikki says that he will pull your guts out through your throat." He straddled his legs again, put a hand beneath his chin, caught himself imagining what it would feel like if his hand were bare and pressed against the dusting of stubble. "He says that he will dig out your eyes and feed them to the ravens -"

Nothing there either, when he finished the list. If anything the cub seemed to retreat deeper into himself, even more glass over his eyes. If Elias went further, if he slapped him, if he punched him, if he started to throttle him, would he snap or would he shatter?

"Look," said Tapio, "I know, Garou business, but we can't stand here forever trying to snap him out of it. There's a war on. Patrol to do."

He had a point. A lost cub this old was probably especially sunk into being human. Especially-especially since there was no sign of a baptismal mark - meant, likely, no one knew of him to mark him, no one back in Russia to give him a preliminary education. He reached for the boot and began to undo the laces.

When he began to tug it off Aleksandr said "No," faintly, from a distance.

"If you won't remedy it in the easiest way," Elias told him, "I have to do something about it in the human way. Do you understand?" But at least Aleksandr had said _something_, never mind it made no sense.

He didn't say anything more, though, didn't say if he understood. The boot, then the sock. Elias examined the sprain and pressed snow against it, then prevailed on Tapio to scrounge up a rag to bind it with. They'd have to keep him from the medic. The medic was a decent person but neither Kin nor Garou, and would notice if the sprain he'd examined healed up so far ahead of schedule. Elias wasn't going to put off shifting lessons until then. He'd say there was just a little twist and he'd taken care of it on the way in, nothing serious. Truthful enough.

"So," he said while wrapping, "he's got the look - how come he's not with the Fangs?"

"Hell if I know," said Heikki.

He looked to Veikko. Veikko looked blank.

"You ask Ilmari-rhya for me, why don't you."

Heikki nodded and turned over the rifle sling, a plastic capsule, a sheaf of papers in Russian, then a separate folded piece with a list of moon phases - on closer examination, they turned out to be the phases on the fourth of each month of 1920 along with all the phases of April that year, and a note at the bottom in a familiar hand:

_Elias: We got the 4 and the 1920, calculated a bunch - you fill in the blank, unless we fucked up completely. By the by, we've dedicated his togs. Plenty of dead time while he was conked out._

Elias swore, not too strongly. A few minutes wasted. Ah well.

_You and Ilmari have fun. Marita._

Next he twisted open the capsule and unrolled another slip of paper inside. An identification form. He'd seen little Red Army boxes like this before, but in those cases the papers were blank. This one was filled out in a cramped neat hand: Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov, born the fourth of September 1920 (the numerals of 4 and 1920 bookending the Cyrillic that had eluded them at the sept), an address in Leningrad (the Rybalkins called it Petrograd, and it was Saint Petersburg in their books). He checked Marita's list. Fourth of September was waning Philodox, unless maybe for some reason the cub had been born across the country in Siberia. What a match.

As far as matches, the other papers held some redundant information. He reviewed them in case of unexpected intelligence, found nothing of the sort. He did come across more details - in a little book buried in the middle of the sheaf, an internal passport, the cub's nationality was listed as Russian and his "social position" listed as "worker." This last struck him as faintly absurd, though he didn't suppose they'd put people down as "Grand Duke" or "count" - he recalled the stuff piped across the border, Molotov's speeches and such, and entertained himself with the image of a passport listing social position as "bloodsucking parasite" (bloodsucking leech, even, bloodsucking corpse, _draugr_, he wondered how the literal undead fared over there in comparison). That done, he stuffed them down his coat.

He got the rest of the story from Heikki and Veikko, everything he could think to ask that they happened to know. Then came the story to be told in the near future. "So we'll say he straggled his way to your house," he said to Heikki. "And you took him over here. Can you get your mom to back that up? Can Paavo handle it?"

Heikki nodded. As time passed he looked more and more abashed.

A few more minutes to get everyone consistent, Veikko giving a primer of the smattering of Finnish he'd taught Aleksandr, and then a goodbye to both the cliath. "Don't wipe out the Wyrm without me, all right?"

"No," said Veikko. "If you are not there when we fight the Wyrm I am very sorry but if we can wipe it out then -"

"Fair enough."

Some more quick goodbyes, hellos to be delivered, and the cliath were off. Elias strapped everything back on, put Aleksandr's rifle over his shoulder, and retrieved Aleksandr's hat. They'd have to walk back to camp - it wasn't as if he or even Tapio could really carry him. "Now I can address you properly, can I not, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?" Did he just flinch? "Are you able to walk? Here - allow me to assist you."

Aleksandr stood up like he sat up, and when Elias braced him with an arm he could limp alongside him.

"Since we know who you are, allow me to return the favor. I am Elias Hunts-With-Mielikki, fostern Ragabash of the Get of Fenris. You will not know what most of that means. Do not concern yourself with it yet. My human name is Elias Laukkanen. This is my cousin, Tapio Koskinen."

Tapio picked up on his own name. "Pleased to meet you," he tossed off as he trudged ahead.

"Tapio says he is pleased to meet you. We will be returning to camp," Elias told him. "We have built a sauna - similar to your banya in Russia, but of course ours is first and best." He laughed. Aleksandr continued the trend and didn't. "I must complete my patrol, but afterward I believe I can obtain some time in it for us. We can relax and discuss the situation in private - we wouldn't want ordinary humans to hear this."

He'd come up with this already. It was only some silent minutes after saying it that he thought of further implications and immediately shoved them away. Perkele, Great Fenris, _no_. He'd shared the sauna with both Ilmari the Tireless and Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm, with Heikki and Kalevi and Olavi and Veikko, with Jalmari Fleet-Of-Foot, with visiting Fenrir, with Tapio and Kustaa and other soldiers of the camp, with _Kolya_, and he'd been absolutely fine. And in all likelihood Aleksandr had been in a bathhouse before, he'd know how it went. It wasn't as though men without clothes on would send Elias into orgasmic frenzy. It wasn't as though this was some surreptitious plan to see Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov naked. He'd decided long before laying eyes on him. What lunatic fucked in a sauna anyway?

Though he _was_ easy on the eyes. The Silver Fangs had that way about them to begin with, their tribal look, their blood shining through plain as Helios to any Garou, and on top of that most of them and their Kin were handsome in a way that humans could also recognize. After all they'd had first pick of Kinfolk for time immemorial and, as the Shadow Lords would readily insinuate, they were as susceptible to a pretty face as anyone else, so given pick between an aristocrat and a good-looking aristocrat...

Was he shuddering against Elias's arm? Surely he hadn't read his thoughts. Elias tightened his hold, resisted the urge to blurt denials. Aleksandr probably hadn't thought of it at all and bringing it up would only put it into his head, put himself into suspicion.

"There is no need to worry. I have you now."

* * *

He shouldn't have filled out the paper. There were all the rest that betrayed him twice over, he knew that, but it was the little one in the capsule they'd handed out to the new conscripts that he kept thinking of. How Kozlov had laughed when he found out. Kozlov had fought in the civil war twenty years ago and said, while still chuckling, _Comrade Novikov, if you're so worried about how they'll know it's you, you're already dead. _

Not dead yet. Not like Kozlov. He'd died in the first days, when the White Finns were closing the encirclement.

Not dead yet, but probably when the White (Laukkanen, that was his name) was done with him he'd shoot him in the head, cut his throat, break his neck, or maybe even then it would be something slow. Something that wouldn't have happened if he'd fought back harder, if he'd made the wolf tear out his throat in the forest.

Laukkanen's grip tightening about his ribcage. Laukkanen's hand cupping his face. Laukkanen's voice, echoing at thankful distance, the slow syllables, obscene formality greasing everything, _Now I can address you properly, Aleksandr Sergeyevich_ (he had no right, some hysterical part of him insisted, he had no _right_), telling him all those things Heikki wanted to do to him, the amiable threat of making him strip there in the snow if he didn't let Laukkanen touch him like that, (it couldn't even have been frisking him, there wasn't _enough_ touching to be that), _I have you now._

And the sauna, like the banya. Together. _Discuss the situation in private._ And Aleksandr thought: together, in that close space, with no clothes on... he couldn't pretend that meant nothing. He couldn't pretend it would be like bathing with comrades, something innocent that men did together.

Laukkanen and his cousin took him into camp and to a dugout with a low ceiling. There they shoved him at another of the Whites and they left for their patrol. This White was called Kustaa Ruotsalainen. Aleksandr thought he looked like the man at the village, though far younger. More relations? The dugout was fairly warm and Ruotsalainen was content to ignore him, while the other two inside it slept near the far end; Aleksandr drifted back to the world here, to the rhythm of the throb in his wrapped ankle, and held still against the wall so as not to disturb this equilibrium.

_Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear._ May 1934. That day he'd read Izvestiya in the apartment, trying not to look like he was paying Gorky's article on Proletarian Humanism any more attention than the rest because why _would_ he?

The year before that, the year Aleksandr turned thirteen, was the year of the Isayev siblings. Raisa Pavlovna Isayeva had shared a grade with him for years but it was now, on the brink, that they noticed her. Him, and Mikhail, and he remembered the other boys in their grade whispering about her. How pretty she was, and things they wanted to do to her, things he hadn't really understood then and he doubted most of them had either. Now he supposed that if she'd ever noticed them in return they would've been at a loss. But at any rate Raisa had her brother Lev, two years older than her, who made sure the other boys had no chance to do any of that. Aleksandr didn't dare get too close but as far as he got Lev found him acceptable - judged him no threat.

Had he judged wrong? Aleksandr hadn't thought so then, hadn't let himself think so. He'd watched Raisa from a distance with the other boys, watched Lev next to her. He agreed, in silence, that Raisa was pretty, that she was lively, that she was sweet. He thought about her sometimes, dreamed of what it would be like if she somehow comprehended his longings in a flash of insight even though he'd never actually shown her anything of the kind, and then there were the especially embarrassing dreams about what he didn't understand.

It wasn't difficult to see Lev and Raisa were related. They weren't identical even besides the obvious; for one thing, Lev had red hair and Raisa had brown. But Lev was handsome for a lot of the same reasons Raisa was pretty, and Raisa's friends adored him though he paid them little attention. Eventually Aleksandr started having some of the same thoughts about Lev, the same dreams - though he knew, too, how silly it was to think that Lev would pay him any more attention than he did Raisa's friends. They were halting thoughts, confusing ones. No one ever said thoughts like these that he could hear and think, yes, this is what I think and other people think this, other boys think this, in a small way it's all right. None of that.

He didn't say these thoughts about Lev, or his thoughts about the other boys he started to look at in the same way after. It wasn't hard - most of his thoughts, like the ones about Raisa and other girls, he didn't say to start with. It was just that there was even more reason not to say thoughts about boys because they wouldn't just be embarrassing. He'd learned, keeping his ears and eyes open, that they were _wrong_ in a deep way, they were perverted, they were corrupted. This confused him too, because he couldn't figure out what might have corrupted him, but there it was.

And the idea that along with being corrupted, he, too, could corrupt... it threatened the youth, Gorky wrote. Was he still "the youth" now that he could threaten other youth? So he'd said nothing, he'd done nothing, and he'd told himself that would be enough. That that had to be enough. That if he never showed it to anyone he couldn't hurt anyone by it. That if he hurt no one else, he'd never have to let them know there was something this wrong with him.

And here it was. It was what he'd wanted, wasn't it? That the White fascists who pulled men's pants to their ankles and cut off their cocks would use him the same way? Would do the things to him that he had to have wanted, hadn't gone after only because he was a coward about getting caught as he was a coward in all other ways?

He didn't _know_ it was going to happen. He didn't _know_ - but he hadn't _known_, either, that the villagers would turn him over. He'd had plenty of opportunity to realize that but had refused to. He wouldn't make that mistake this time. Maybe the hunger in that look was, after all, only a hunger to see him suffer. But he couldn't assume that. This time he would anticipate the worst, for all the good it would do him. If nothing else it wouldn't shock him; it wouldn't crush his last hopes, just put them out of their misery. _Just maybe_ Laukkanen was only dangerous in the same way an ordinary wolf would be dangerous, but there was no point in fooling himself into thinking this would be the case.

Ruotsalainen was shaking one of the other men awake. A brief, whispered, exchange. He muttered something at Aleksandr and climbed out of the dugout. The man he'd woken up took his place. He looked half-asleep and sullen. Aleksandr held still.

_You can do the same, because you are, in fact, the same._

Not just a fascist, not just a White butcher, but a monster in the truest sense. A wolf-man, no, a werewolf. Laukkanen had said so himself. No wonder the White Finns were holding out if they had _those_ fighting for them. The only mystery was why people didn't know by now, but this was easily answered if he supposed they left no survivors.

_It is very simple, very fast._

The same. 

That round scar. He hadn't looked at it since, had tried to put it out of mind.

"Ivan," they were calling, outside. "Ivan!"

Where was Ruotsalainen? With them? Now one of them was reaching in, was climbing in, walking bent down as one had to in here. Aleksandr moved back as far as he dared; any further and he'd fall over the last sleeping man, and that would probably make things worse.

This man exchanged words with the one Ruotsalainen had left watching him; the latter shrugged, and the former closed on Aleksandr, grabbing his arm. The other hand yanked his bag from his shoulder and let it fall. Aleksandr was towed and then shoved out of the dugout; he put up no resistance. He glanced back for a moment and saw the erstwhile watcher already lying back down. He got another shove for that.

Three more of them stood close by outside, laughing as he stumbled and blinked in the afternoon light. Surrounded again. He wrapped his arms around himself and huddled as much as he could on his own, weight on his left foot. They were in the open, this time, and nothing he could do.

A push from behind sent him to hands and knees. He saw one of them drawing a booted foot back to kick and recoiled so quickly as to fall over again. The laughing was even louder now, mixed with jeers. They feigned several more kicks at his ribs and head. He curled like a worm, staring into his knees, his arms wrapped over his head, trying to steady his breathing.

"Ivan, Ivan!"

He looked up, in spite of himself, and saw one of them take out their rifle and point it at him. "Please," Aleksandr said again, "no," alternating the Russian _please_ with the Finnish _no_ as the barrel came closer until it nearly touched his forehead. At that point he fell silent. At least this way it wouldn't hurt for long, he told himself, but when it clicked on an empty chamber he nearly pissed himself.

At the periphery someone else came closer. Maybe _his_ rifle would be loaded, but Aleksandr never found out, because the one who'd not-shot him waved back his companion and dragged him up by his throat. He scrabbled to get his feet beneath him before he choked. The White snarled in his face, then jeered, and he stared back, mouth working without sound, hands fluttering open and closed and _please, please - _

A shout. The White let him fall. He knelt, gradually looking up as Ruotsalainen elbowed his way through the gathered knot of Whites around Aleksandr, still shouting; in the Finnish (no more of the wolves' language here) Aleksandr heard _Laukkanen_ several times. Eventually the knot dispersed. Ruotsalainen came to a stop in front of him, staring down. He held dishes of something that steamed in the cold air.

That reminded him of the meal last night, of what to say. _"Kiitos."_ It meant thank you, didn't it?

Ruotsalainen blinked at him, then ushered him back into the dugout and gave him a dish of soup and a spoon and then, out of a pocket of his white coat like Heikki had, another piece of bread. While he ate, Ruotsalainen shook that man awake again and they began to argue.

It seemed now as though Laukkanen's claim on him _(I have you now)_ at least afforded him some protection from the rest. Should he be grateful for that?

He was grateful, at least, to be fed. Another half-a-promise that he wouldn't die yet - could he let himself believe that much? He believed it too easily, because _(That was a pleasant bout)_ it was easy for him to believe that Laukkanen wanted to enjoy himself for a long time.

* * *

"I stepped out to get lunch," Kustaa was telling him, "and when I got back they were on him like - like -" Of course he couldn't say wolves. "Having sport with him. If I hadn't gotten back when I did there would've been a massacre."

"I'm not so sure about that," said Elias. He didn't bother whispering. Anyone listening would assume he meant that surely his fellow soldiers had more decency than to shoot a prisoner, that the plurality of _massacre_ was Kustaa being dramatic. Aleksandr hadn't frenzied out in the forest; Elias figured it would take more than a little teasing to set him off now.

"I found out later one of them was pushing a rifle in his face."

To some Fenrir that might still qualify as teasing. Many people, Elias understood, did not share their opinion. Kustaa, Kin though he was, appeared to be one of them. He thought of pointing this out and decided there was no need to further Kustaa's Garou-related anxieties. "Oh? Which one?"

"Nieminen. And that shithead Vaino, I ask him just to watch while I'm out, make sure the Russkie doesn't take it in his head to cut open Mikael with his own puukko, and what does he do, he hands the kid over when the pricks come knocking." Funny hearing him say kid, considering Kustaa was only older than Aleksandr by a few months. "I shouldn't have to _tell_ him not to hand over people to mobs when you're watching them, it should be a _given_."

"Uh huh. Well, thanks for averting massacre." Here in the camp, among allies if not friends (especially after this debacle), was the wrong place for massacre. "I'll talk with them."

Inside the dugout, Aleksandr slept slumped against the wall, one arm wrapped around the battered bag and hat in his lap, the other dropped at his side with the fingers curled upward. His head tilted back and in the fading light, rife with deeper shadow, Elias could make out the stubs - not quite strands - of dark hair poking out from under the scarf, the beginnings of a fringe; Elias again imagined him with a fringe, with an entire thick mane. His mouth had fallen slightly open, and again its shape preoccupied Elias more than it should have. He found himself also unduly preoccupied by the slight twitches of Aleksandr's eyelids, the corresponding movement of his lashes.

If he hadn't been a Garou -

Well, if he hadn't been a Garou, he wouldn't be here.

Elias crouched beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Aleksandr Sergeyevich?"

Aleksandr jerked upright, out from under his hand. His eyes squeezed further shut before opening. For a moment he regarded Elias with undisguised wariness before ducking his head. Both hands were on his bag now, crowned with the hat.

"I am pleased to inform you it is our turn for the sauna."

Aleksandr nodded. He looked faintly sick.

"How does your ankle fare?"

A hesitation. "About... about the same."

"Do you think you might be ill?"

Another hesitation, followed by a minute shake of the head.

It was because of the hesitation that Elias checked, pressing their foreheads together like he remembered his mother and then his aunt doing when Helena and Tapio were sick (even before they Firsted, he and Marita had never required this that he recalled). If there was a fever, this rough measure didn't pick it up. Even so, Aleksandr looked if possible even more ill when he came away. Nothing to be done about it. "Here we go, then. You can leave the bag."

Aleksandr came up easily, leaning the bag against the wall with the hat still atop it. Elias guided him out of the dugout and across the camp, waving with his free arm to those he passed. At least Nieminen wasn't one of them; Elias hadn't decided yet what to do about him.

The numerous centimeters Aleksandr had on him continued to make it slightly awkward to maneuver, but they were accustomed to one another's movements by now and reached the field sauna without much difficulty. The main difficulty was that by then Elias's cock insisted this new period of closeness meant something. He dawdled outside the sauna for a bit, chattering about its construction, but Aleksandr was looking more anxious by the moment so Elias told him to call him if he needed any help and sent him in first. Aleksandr turned his back; once he'd shrugged the coat off his shoulders, Elias looked up at the sky past the trees and thought very hard about the most grotesque fomori he'd ever fought and reviewed the Litany with emphasis on the first bit.

Aleksandr had been alone in there for a while now, and a Soviet plane was churning overhead, oblivious to their camouflaged camp. Hell with it, he thought at last, shedding his coat. If Aleksandr noticed, he'd just wax poetic about the girls in the Lotta Svard who did such great work for the soldiers, and what they might be hiding under those austere uniforms. He'd mention, very casually, how being cooped up out here could make you feel fourteen again, and as easily excited. It wasn't as if men getting hard by other men came up very often, did it?

* * *

He was hard, Aleksandr saw immediately, and once he took this in - taking in, at the same time, the minor detail of the scar higher on Laukkanen's body, slashed between shoulder and lower collarbone - he turned his head away. Laukkanen might make him look at him later, but Aleksandr saw no reason to preempt him. His own hands folded in his lap, a flimsy shield.

Laukkanen sat down beside him. "You should eat more."

That struck a brief spark of anger - he'd certainly have _liked_ to have eaten more, if only the White Finns hadn't cut off their supply lines and attacked the field kitchens. Another one, of righteous indignation: did Laukkanen think he could buy him with soup? These sparks faded quickly. Of course Laukkanen didn't think that. Laukkanen didn't need to buy him.

Laukkanen said nothing else for a while, just let out long contented sighs, and Aleksandr wasn't sure whether this was a mercy or just a torment, delaying the dreaded and the inevitable. He kept staring to the side. No relaxing this time.

_Come home._ His mother had said this to him the day Aleksandr and Mikhail were to report, last September, not long after their shared birthday. Hugged him and tucked her head into his shoulder and whispered directly into his ear. When she came away she looked embarrassed, maybe to have said it. He wasn't sure if she'd said the same to Mikhail, when she hugged him in turn. Whatever she'd said, Mikhail had groaned at it.

_Come home_ - and how was he to do that? The ready answer was that he couldn't. Escape? His limping footprints would be visible in the snow for any White on skis to run him down, and even if more snow happened to fill them up he was sure Laukkanen's wolf-half would follow his scent.

Was there a cost he could pay for survival? What could he offer?

Anything, was his first thought. Anything, he'd do anything - but Aleksandr knew he couldn't say so. Laukkanen would be sure to choose the part of anything that he couldn't make good on, tell him to do the things he couldn't do if he had the smallest scrap of integrity left. He'd failed, no denying that, but he couldn't drag others with him.

He had barely anything to bargain with. In nearly all matters where his cooperation might be worth something, he _couldn't_ cooperate, nonnegotiable. It wasn't as if he was a trove of military intelligence to start with, but he had to guard even what little he knew. He had to keep in mind that even if he _did_ do anything he could, told everything, betrayed everything, Laukkanen could renege on a whim.

Small sacrifices, for small favors.

It _was_ a small sacrifice, no matter if his gut didn't seem to think so. After all, Laukkanen could simply force him. And a small favor - something that would barely matter to Laukkanen, since he could hardly be asked to cut short his game. Nothing was certain, but...

Another while, getting his speech in order, waiting for the "discussion" to begin.

"Does your ankle pain you, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?"

Aleksandr thought that, warmed and unwrapped, the pain there might have grown again. He looked down. Was it swelling? He didn't look long before Laukkanen was leaning down, drawing his leg over the bench across Laukkanen's lap. At that point, dangerously close to looking _there_, he turned away again, concentrated on keeping himself covered and suppressing his winces while Laukkanen prodded his ankle.

"Well," Laukkanen said at last, taking his hands away, "it shouldn't matter, in the long run."

Aleksandr wondered briefly if there would be any repercussions for pulling back his leg. Then Laukkanen took hold of it again, depositing it back on the floor. He shoved his legs together.

A splash and sizzle - the water in the waiting bucket. The enclosure grew humid. Laukkanen said, "Come now. You act as though you have never done this before."

_Not like this. _

He had better get it over with, as quick and clean as he could make it. He'd wondered whether to pitch himself in the same key of formality, but decided Laukkanen might not like someone playing the same game as he was. "I'd like to ask you a favor."

"You may ask. Naturally, my response would depend on the favor."

"Yes. Thank you. Am I a prisoner?"

"Is that your favor? You would like me to answer that question?"

"I... no, I..."

"Oh, there's no need. Technically, yes, you are a prisoner of war, but I would rather that you thought of yourself as a guest."

"And there's... registrations? Records?"

"Oh yes, there is some of that. Why wouldn't there be? I'll take care of it tomorrow. I will have to excuse you from being sent to the prisoner-of-war camp, but since the captain is a friend to us that shouldn't be very difficult - though of course," and Laukkanen laughed, "I will have to be a little creative as to why you should stay." There were enough like him, at least in this one way, to make a _camp?_ Who knew? After all, Laukkanen had just made clear that if he had his way Aleksandr would never see it. Maybe later he'd start using it as a threat. "I think that if we play things correctly, you could even send a letter home."

A letter, at least, if _he'd_ never... He wanted to cling to that possibility but no, it would run entirely counter to the goal. He had to concentrate on that. "I see. Thank you. The favor... I'd like to ask you -" Repeating himself, he knew.

"Go on and ask."

"Could you _not_ make a record?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said I'm technically a prisoner. Without the technicality? If you could just leave it out, if you could leave me out of the records... or if I have to be in them, could it be another name? I could make one for you if you want." That couldn't be too hard. Vladimir Nikolayevich Golubev was the first to come to mind, but Golubev deserved better than that. "I know you have my paper, but most of us threw them away anyway. It wouldn't be strange if I didn't have one." He remembered, belatedly, his other papers.

Laukkanen remembered as well. "Oh, your papers. I'd forgotten. I can return them, if you like... but many of us know you're an Aleksandr by now. At this point, presenting yourself as Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov might be complicated."

He knew that, now that he thought of it. He'd established it all the way back in the village, with Veikko. And then there was Laukkanen, throwing around the Sergeyevich. And he thought he remembered that Laukkanen had used his full name in his "introductions" with Ruotsalainen. But barring that... and who among the Whites would particularly care if the patronymic and surname were different than they remembered? "That's fine. There are plenty of Aleksandrs."

"Would you mind, then, explaining why you'd like to be a different Aleksandr, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?"

His throat locked up on this. To expose himself as surely as if - _concentrate, concentrate._ Laukkanen might be a degenerate White fascist, might be a monster, but surely there was _something_ human left, or at least not enough of the inhuman that he'd contrive to turn this against Aleksandr out of spite. The worst that could happen was he'd say no.

Of all times to be optimistic. But what else could he do?

"I know I... I haven't done very well. And my family... I have brothers, a cousin... it's not their fault. It isn't their fault I came out this way. Please. Let them think I died when I should have. I don't want them to be punished for it." Was Laukkanen actually stifling laughter? He didn't dare look. So much for optimism. "Please. Would you want your mother to be... to..."

"Hmm. I wonder what you would say if I told you I was an orphan."

"Please. _Please_." He was already facing away from Laukkanen but he shut his eyes anyway, to shut out doubly what he knew was behind him.

"Oh come now, this rigmarole can't be necessary. Not when you could simply go home with the end of the war. Couldn't you?"

So he held out the prospect of surviving the war. Aleksandr couldn't believe it. It was probably just a ploy to get him to cooperate, a superfluous one at that. "I can't go home. I know I won't. I know what's going to happen. What has to happen. You don't have to pretend you'll let me live." And if he did live by some miracle, what then? Desertion, treason. Dead was, in a way, safer. Surely with so many dead and missing in the Finnish forests they couldn't assume the worst for every one of them.

Laukkanen laughing again, not stifling it as well this time.

"If you do this little thing for me I'll... I'll do what I can. I don't know much of anything, I was just a conscript, but other things... I can do other things for you. And I won't fight back, whatever you do to me, I promise I won't."

"Ha, and what would you say if I told you I liked a bit of a fight?" Aleksandr was spared answering (spared that, at least) when Laukkanen immediately continued, "What sort of things, pray tell? What do you expect me to do to you?"

He _was_ that inhuman. He wanted Aleksandr to say it out loud, to seal what he was reduced to. "Things. I'll do... things." He wasn't articulate to begin with but this was a new low. He remembered the slang, the whispers, but to say any of it still entailed forcing it up through his locked throat. "I could... I could do it the... the French way."

"The French way?"

"Yes. I could... use my mouth. Or any other way you want. I've never done it before but -"

Incredulous now, "You've never done _what_?"

This, on top of everything. No, he'd never done it before. Not even a kiss that was anything but chaste. Even before realizing what he had with the Isayevs, he'd been afraid to do anything that might lead to that. He'd suspected _something_ was wrong with him, in that way, but worse to hear it from _him_. Worse, still, to think that this would be the first time doing anything like it, to think that Laukkanen and maybe other White Finns would be first and last, so he tried not to think of it as he forged ahead. "Anything like that. Anything. I'm sorry if I'm not very good at it. I'm sorry. But I've never. Not with girls, even -"

And now sharp, without a trace of amusement or greasy mockery, "You've never done _what_ with girls?"

Aleksandr knew with that question the size of the mistake he'd made. His legs pulled back onto the bench, feet pressed against the edge, blood rushing through his ankle. His arms clamped over his head as they had when the other Whites had kicked at him outside the dugout. Small help, he knew. The air was still steamy; he wasn't sure how much of his sweat was heat and how much was terror. He wanted to scream, to flail out, to run as fast and far as he could; he kept fighting it down, knowing it wouldn't help. But what _could_ help? "I'm sorry," he choked out. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, I'm sorry, _please_..."

He waited, locked in position, through the long silence, then the rapid footsteps. When he finally peered over his knees, he found himself alone.


	3. Consternation

** Chapter Three: Consternation**

Elias pulled his clothes on with such jerks that he was lucky they didn't rip. "Hey, Sergeant," someone called over, "Having fun with the Russkie?" and Elias wanted to punch him, take Hispo and throat him. He kept himself together enough to track down Kustaa and prevail upon him for another round of watching-over before storming to the edge of camp. There he wanted to take lupus and fly into the forest, howl out his frustrations. His breath came fast as if he'd just been in battle.

Some battle. Walking in with his cock stiff, laughing at the cub's fears - he had to have blown things out of proportion, exaggerated, right, why else would he think they'd pulled him through all this just to kill him? - and refusing to realize until Aleksandr just about clobbered him over the head with it.

What else was there to do with your mouth that could be _not even with girls_?

Aleksandr's body - definitely skinny, almost gaunt, but still, _still_, even now he thought of those long legs, the muscle still in them, and he bet they'd have grace with the ankle healed, out of deep snow (he _did_ need to eat more but Elias had determined this in the aftermath of prolonged observation). The round scar on Aleksandr's chest, in the area of the heart, nearly invisible. Aleksandr refusing to look at him - he knew. Perkele, he _knew_.

And knowing that he knew that, had figured that out, Elias couldn't brush off all those other fears of his as so much twitchy nerves, so much jumping at shadows.

He'd been teasing. Just teasing!

And translating Heikki's threats, and dragging him from the tree, and a kid _might_ get the wrong idea from that mightn't they? Especially when he wasn't the average lost cub to be cleaned up and given new clothes but a prisoner from across the border to be guarded as well as guided, who needed everything in translation.

Elias ground a boot into the snow, wondering if he could grind all the way to the dirt beneath. What a fuck-up.

* * *

Had he seriously gotten it into his head that Laukkanen wanted to fuck him? Homosexuals might run rampant under fascism but they couldn't _all_ be homosexuals and what made him think even the homosexuals would want _him?_ What proof had he had, what real proof? All those looks and all those touches - they hadn't meant anything. He'd seen them through the distortions of his own perversion.

And now Laukkanen knew. Knew how low he really was, how depraved, not only that he wanted this but that he'd sell himself to get it. He had to have wanted it, deep down, wanted it so badly that he deep-down-thought this would be the perfect excuse, that if he could just say to himself it was the White Finn and not him...

Now even Laukkanen's small protection would be gone.

He washed mechanically and stayed seated, his face resting in his hands, delaying the inevitable. The steam evaporated; in the dry heat, the tears that seeped out soon evaporated as well. He grew thirsty. He'd been thirsty before.

* * *

He encountered Juhani Nieminen coming back from the field kitchen with friends, chuckling together over something and couldn't he _imagine_ what. "Hi there, Private Nieminen," he called, changing direction to cross paths with them, all too-wide smiles. "Can we talk?"

Nieminen nodded and waved on his friends. It was perhaps to his credit that he was willing to stand alone, and perhaps also to his credit that he didn't smile back. He stood holding his steaming dish and waited for Elias to come up to him.

"So then," said Elias, still painting on a grossly overcompensating air of joviality, "I hear you've been getting on well with our Red Army man."

_Then_ Nieminen cracked a smile, which vanished fast as it appeared. "Really, sir? Ruotsalainen didn't think so."

"I hear you've been having fun with him. Playing games and so on."

"I guess so, sir."

"As a matter of fact, it seems you've had so much fun with him he thinks he might even stay here the rest of his life."

"Oh?"

"Oh yeah. You see, in _some_ way or other he's gotten the idea that we're going to torture him to death."

And more than your ordinary torture with the finger-breaking and the holding of heads underwater.

_I won't fight back, whatever you do to me, I promise I won't._

And unless there was something Kustaa had completely missed, Elias knew _that_ idea wasn't on Nieminen's head. For now, it was nice to pretend it was. That if he just told off Nieminen enough it would all fall into place.

Nieminen said nothing to that, so Elias went on. "Any idea how hard it is having a proper conversation with someone who thinks you'll kill them no matter what? Kid was so convinced he didn't even ask for mercy. All he wanted was for me to try and set things in order with his family. Perkele, seems you have quite a touch."

Another fleeting expression, this one of surprise and maybe shame, before Nieminen's lips thinned. "Can't say what's going on in the Russkie's head, sir, but I don't think I've got that good of a touch. 'Course, speaking their jabber as you do, sir, you've got to have a better idea of that than me."

_Fuck you with a moose antler_, thought Elias, then shoved the comparison away; the turn of phrase raked a raw spot. He didn't think he'd be pushed far enough to frenzy over this, born under the new moon as he was, but that didn't stop what Rage he had from agitating further. "Ah, got it, so you were putting your rifle in his face for his health."

Nieminen snorted. "All due respect, sir, haven't you got more to worry about than one Russkie shitting himself? Can't see how you stand going near the mottis, in that case."

Oh yeah, Elias thought, I've got a thousand times more to worry about than you'll ever know, shithead. In that case, Wyrm and all, haven't I got more to worry about than one little country? "Might ask the same for you. Haven't you got more to worry about than whether or not one kid conscript's got enough of the fear of Finland in him? Not like he up and pointed at us on the map. You happen to get hold of Molotov and want to shove _him_ around, be my guest."

* * *

Eventually outside other Whites knocked and called with some impatience, "_Ryssn_! Ivan!" and Ruotsalainen called in their wake, "Aleksandr Sergeyevich!" He got up and limped out, favoring his swollen ankle, trying to ignore the grumbling trio as well as Ruotsalainen not far away as he dressed in the half-dark. In the middle of it he managed to find an intact patch of snow close by; he scooped it up with a gloved hand and packed it loosely around his ankle before continuing until nothing was left of the pile of clothes but the coat, the boots, the socks, and the rag Laukkanen had used to bind the sprain.

"_Ryssn._"

He looked up. Two of the Whites had already shed their own clothes and gone in, but this one still had on trousers and an undershirt. He extended something in his bare hand and moved it up and down. Offering? Aleksandr stared at it, not trusting the part of him that wanted to believe.

"_Ryssn,_" the White repeated, and Aleksandr reached out and picked the thing from his hand. He received no punishment for this so he supposed it _was_ an offer, after all. When he held it close, in slightly better light, he guessed it was a cigarette.

He looked back up at the White, who'd already turned away and was pulling his shirt over his head. "_Kiitos,_" he called, as loud as he could let himself, and the White jerked slightly but continued without further acknowledgment. Aleksandr put the gift in one of the deep pockets of the trousers.

When he was finished dressing Ruotsalainen came up and showed him along another path. At least Ruotsalainen didn't hold him close as Laukkanen, didn't even touch him; it made the going a little harder but it helped what scraps were left of his pride. This path eventually led to another small house above ground; the windows were black but light blazed out when the door opened. Ruotsalainen led him past a flock of gathered men. A number of them called things as they went by, some with cheer and others with derision.

In a smaller room another man, in different and distinct uniform - a higher-ranking officer? - sat at a table, sweeping the last of some papers from the surface. Besides the papers, the table held a lamp, a heavy book, two plates of steaming food and utensils to match, a pair each of heavy tin cups and canteens, and a kettle. This man exchanged some words with Ruotsalainen, who left and shut the door behind him, then motioned Aleksandr to sit in front of one of the plates.

He wasn't dead yet. Maybe he could still salvage something. Aleksandr sat and looked back at the man, who smiled at him, picked up the kettle, and filled the cups. This done, he said, haltingly, in Russian with a strong accent, "Eat. Please eat."

"_Kiitos,_" Aleksandr replied again, and did as he was told. He could try to enjoy this while it was still there. The coffee was bitter but warm and smelled good in the cup; out of the cup it slaked part of his thirst. The water in the canteen did the rest. He glanced around the room between bites; it had a few other pieces of furniture, like (his stomach lurched) a double bed with no bedding. Stripped down, impersonal. He wondered who had lived here before this. He cleared the plate more slowly than he had those before it, folded his hands, and kept his head down.

"Aleksandr Sergeyevich?"

He looked up and the man walked around to his side of the table, indicating that he should turn in the chair and extend his right leg. When he did the man set about taking off the boot, the sock beneath it. Aleksandr held still.

Finally, the man unwrapped the rag and examined his ankle, making soothing noises like Kuzin did with the horses alternating with noises that sounded like nothing so much as the ones his father made when tending to scrapes. Eventually the man took off his gloves, put them in a pocket of his tunic, and placed his bare hands against the bare skin. Maybe he was a doctor.

"Good," the man said, "It's good," and began to rub.

Aleksandr kept his eyes on the movement of the man's hands, wincing occasionally, and fancying that the swelling was sinking down beneath the touch, the throb there blending back with the normal movement of blood. When the man took his hands away, he realized this fancy seemed to have manifested.

"Oh," he breathed.

The man stood up, smiling, and gestured for him to stand. He did with ease. Then he took a few steps, unbalanced on the bare foot but all painless. "Oh," he said again, and felt himself smile back. There might be werewolves, there might be monsters, but at least there was this as well.

Aleksandr stayed standing as the man went back to his side of the table and sat down. When he was beginning to feel awkward, the man smiled at him and gestured him back into the chair. He readily complied, taking the opportunity to pull the sock and boot back on.

The man paged through the book and then leaned forward, still smiling. He looked gentle. If there was anything hiding behind that, he couldn't see it. "Hungry?"

"No. Thank you."

"Good. Good." He checked the book again. "How old?"

He wondered what danger there could be in answering. Eventually, finding none, he said, "Nineteen."

"Ah," said the man. Another consultation. "Comfortable?"

Aleksandr might have said yes in that moment, except that the very question evoked all the reasons not to be comfortable. He said nothing.

The man's face softened and he returned to his browsing without demanding an answer.

* * *

If nothing else Elias had rank to pull, and at the end of it Nieminen had gone away muttering "Yes, sir." Elias watched him go, holding his dinner; he took a small spiteful pleasure in thinking it had grown cold in the interim. After that, he'd distracted himself for another stretch attending to his men, informing them what was what. A number of them seemed dubious, but least they seemed to take it better than Nieminen.

Now Elias waved at the men lounging about in the warmth and knocked on the door of what had been the bedroom. "Captain Jokela? Sergeant Laukkanen. Sorry I'm late, sir."

"It's no trouble," Jokela called. "Come in."

When he did, the first thing he saw was Aleksandr, seated opposite Jokela, twisting toward the door, eyes large, mouth parting, flinching from him. Elias shut the door behind him and turned around to place the simple latch.

When he turned back, Aleksandr had slid from the chair onto his hands and knees, shoulders hunched, head ducked, groveling, murmuring. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't think, I shouldn't have... shouldn't have... I was stupid... please..."

Jokela was staring at Elias now, probably wondering what he'd done to the cub to inspire this. And could he tell him this wasn't what it looked like? That it was, in fact, _worse_ than what it looked like?

He moved closer and crouched at the other's level. By now the murmur was riddled with catches in the breath. "Aleksandr Sergeyevich?"

"Yes... yes?"

He wanted to push him upright by the shoulders, sit him down properly, but at this point touching him would probably sink Elias deeper into the grave he'd already dug for himself. "Would you please look at me?"

Aleksandr lifted his head. The tears precariously balanced in his eyes threatened to slip out with each shudder of breath. The more Elias looked at him the more the dissonance struck him. The Silver Fang look went with heroics and grand gestures and nobility in both senses of the word; terrified pleas for mercy made a perverse combination.

"It isn't necessary to sit down here. There are more comfortable places -" Aleksandr's eyes flicked and Elias knew from his other visits to Jokela's improvised office that he was looking toward the bed. Damn it, he'd managed to shove in another blithe innuendo. Of course he hadn't _meant_ it but he hadn't _meant_ any of the rest either. He half-stood; Aleksandr stayed kneeling. He extended an arm; Aleksandr stood up without taking it. Elias looked to his legs, his feet. Was he standing more easily now?

"You fixed his ankle?" he asked Jokela.

"Should I not have?"

"He could've healed it himself."

"But he didn't." Jokela's tone was perfectly even, but at this point he probably thought Elias had twisted that ankle himself, so as to give him incentive to shift or some such shit. It wouldn't have been out of the question, there being tribal precedent; he remembered the story of how Aili's grandfather Firsted only after Aili's great-grandfather lost patience and took a hammer to his arm. _Damn it! _

During this exchange, Aleksandr had walked across to the bed and seated himself on the bare mattress, hands folded as they were in the sauna, head up, looking at Elias as asked. Elias quickly rejected the notion of sitting alongside him. Instead he took the chair, pulled it closer, turned it about, and sat straddling it, his chin resting on his arms, his arms crossed atop the chair's back.

"Now then," said Elias, switching back to Russian, "it seems that I have been in error."

Aleksandr's eyes went slightly wider.

"As I've told you, we Garou are meant to be above human conflicts. I may have told you this, but it seems I have not proven my words particularly well. And occasionally we do not stay aloft, as it were. Aloof. One of those... I apologize. Let me say now that I intend you absolutely no harm. I hardly expect you to believe this with ease, so allow me to prove it to you in the time we have together. Now, to begin with, there is something I would like to address in regard to our last conversation."

The balance tipped. Tears began to slide down Aleksandr's flushed face. He clapped his gloved hands against his cheekbones, not quite touching the eyes themselves, which continued to stare at him through their gloss.

"No," said Elias, too loudly. Aleksandr jerked. "No, no. Do _not_ be afraid. I would never do that to you. I would never do it at _all._ Never. Perkele!"

The shudders of Aleksandr's breath turned to sobs. He folded downward, his chest nearing his thighs, his hands spreading to encompass even more of his face, but he didn't look away.

Elias muttered a few more choice curses. His impulse was to go to him, take him up like a fallen bird, but at this point it might spark panic, maybe even fox frenzy, and that would upset the charade. No, the Fenrir way was probably the right one - sit here and wait for him to settle down (Well. That was one Fenrir way. Another way would be to box his ears and tell him to stop sniveling, which Elias found eminently unsuitable in context). He tried this. He hadn't reached the count of twenty-six before his resolve weakened.

A compromise, then. He kicked his legs off the chair and propelled it forward across the floor until he could, if he wanted to, reach through the slats and touch Aleksandr's hair or knee or elbow or corner of his eye, which he didn't do. "There is no need to fret," he said, soft and smooth as he could manage, reseating himself and recrossing his arms. "There is no need to worry about such a thing. I would never do that. You are in no danger from me. _No danger_." Jokela cleared his throat; Elias could well take the meaning of _that_, at least, and redoubled his effort to smooth away the jagged edges. "Why are you crying?"

He heard Jokela walk up behind him, saw him come up to the side. He'd drawn a handkerchief from his pocket and glanced only briefly at Elias before holding it out. "Take it," he said in his broken Russian. "Please take it."

Aleksandr slowly half-shifted his gaze from Elias to the handkerchief. He half-watched it for a stretch, as if waiting for it to vanish or strike him, before one hand darted up and a second later it was clamped across his face. "Thank you," he choked out, thick and muffled behind the handkerchief, in Russian and then Finnish, his attention going back to Elias. His sobs - maybe Elias only wanted to believe they were slowing down, that he was gradually straightening up - were punctuated by the odd wet sniff. At least, Elias thought, there was no way he'd get hard from _that_; snot and mucus held no appeal for him.

He waited. Eventually Aleksandr choked out, "I'm so... so stupid." His head lowered for half a moment before it flew back up, as though his life depended on keeping eye contact. For all Elias knew this might not be far off from whatever was going on in his head.

"I wouldn't say that," said Elias. "Why do you say that?"

"I thought... actually thought you wanted..." He descended back into wretched incoherence, nearly doubled over, elbows clamping his knees.

It took another minute for Elias to realize. Aleksandr knew, or thought he'd known. He'd figured out part of it, guessed wrong on the rest, and now he was questioning the lot and probably his sanity with it. "You actually thought I wanted to..." To sodomize, to copulate, to mate? He remembered leafing through the legal arguments over whether _mate_ was the sum total of the prohibition or whether the composers of yesteryear or yestermillennium simply hadn't anticipated how creative the act of fucking could get. For that matter, to fuck? No, he didn't know the Russian for that. (To _rape_? No, _no_) "... have sex with you."

Aleksandr's nod was a small convulsion like the jerk of a string on a marionette, like the snapping neck of a hanged man.

"You were not entirely wrong."

For a few seconds the sobbing stopped, probably out of utter shock. Aleksandr's hands slid from his face, taking the handkerchief with them. The handkerchief went back up, but only as far as his mouth, as he started gasping again, struggling to fill his lungs.

"But you see, as with civilized beings the world over, that I bear this desire does not mean that I will act on it with abandon." _Just because I want to fuck you doesn't mean I'd just about rape you._ It was almost soothing, the process of glossing everything in the formalities of another language. Just holding the words in his head he could imagine the way it would tear at him to say it in Finnish. Would Jokela with his dictionary manage to understand what he was getting at? Who gave a damn, he told himself. "I will be frank, as you have no doubt realized this already. I find men handsome in the same way I find women handsome. This is the case for you, Aleksandr Sergeyevich. I find you very handsome. I admit this." If it turned out Aleksandr held some especial hatred for men who looked at men like he did, well, things wouldn't be any worse than they were before he'd gotten this in the open. "This does not mean I cannot control myself. I am well aware of the reasons it would be wrong for me to think only of what I want."

As he'd talked, Aleksandr's breath had mostly settled and his back partly straightened. The handkerchief had come down again, all the way into his lap. While he watched Elias, he was distractedly folding the soiled cloth by touch. His hands, though still gloved, were deft, and he finished quickly, leaving a neat white square he again closed his hands over. Elias tore himself from the sight.

"As far as humans are concerned, you are a prisoner of war. In fact, most of the others believe that Captain Jokela had you brought here for questioning and that I am here to interpret for him. To me, you are not a prisoner. You are a cub in need of teaching, and I happen to be the most convenient source. I see you do not believe that. I hope that eventually you will. Whether captor or teacher, it would be an abysmal thing for me to exploit our positions. As a proper teacher I would have your trust to abuse; as I lack that, as a captor I have your fear. Would you have made the same offer if you were not afraid of what you thought I would do to you otherwise?"

He waited until he got a hesitant shake of the head. Satisfied with that, he was about to move on until Aleksandr said, very faintly, hands drifting up as though to hide behind them again, "I wasn't..."

"Yes? You can tell me."

"I... I wasn't thinking of that, otherwise." He looked like he wanted to just let it pass by, like he couldn't quite understand why he was turning in something that could hurt him. "I was thinking if I did it, willingly, that you'd do what I... what I asked."

That detail had just about slipped his mind while others - the offer itself, the fear, Aleksandr not looking at him - had seared themselves across the back of his eyelids. He pulled it back up. Hardly an artillery shell. "You believed the best choice available was to let them believe you died well. You did not believe you would ever return to, ah, Leningrad and in doing so disprove this. You believed that I intended to kill you either way. Did you also believe I would force you, either way?"

Aleksandr flushed again. Another hesitation. "I thought... I thought you might, but I..." _But I was wrong and I'm so stupid_, Elias could almost hear.

"You would have rather not had sex with me at all."

After a longer silence he mouthed what looked like "No," then shook his head again.

"I tell you, there is no good way to do it with someone who does not wish to be there, with someone who fears you, with someone who believes you will murder them. I believe that, quite strongly, and I will hold to it. Understood?"

Another small nod.

"You do not have to keep looking at me if you do not wish to."

His gaze dropped away so quickly that somewhere sometime else Elias would've laughed.

"That is one reason. Another is related, specifically, to what we are. Garou. Werewolves. Do you understand?"

Still faint, "I... not really..."

"I will demonstrate later. For now, understand that we all are taught a code of the most important laws of the Garou Nation, which we call the Litany. The first law of the Litany, which some might assume means the most imperative - though I will leave that to the judges - is that Garou shall not mate with Garou. Granted, what would have happened between us if I were someone I am not, or if you were someone more amenable in better circumstances, would not have, strictly speaking, been mating. But it does not seem entirely in the spirit of the law that two men might revel as much as they like in the assurance they cannot produce metis. Metis, by the way, are the result of the union of two Garou. When the two Garou are a man and a woman, in any case, though if Gaia were to bestow two men with a womb or two women with seed in order to lay down the law I would not put it past her. Metis themselves can never bear or sire children, unless perhaps if they began to mate with one another in the assurance that they wouldn't. There is always something wrong with them, in body or in mind. Often in birth they harm the mother, and sometimes she even dies in childbirth, though we are generally difficult to kill. Metis have the advantage of starting from the inside. In any case, unless we were surprised by a womb we would not have produced a metis, but the principle behind this rule, our judges tend to agree, is that we are not to isolate ourselves away from our human Kin and inbreed among ourselves. Metis are a symptom of the prohibition, not the cause. Do you follow?"

Aleksandr nodded. He still looked fairly adrift, but at least not completely.

Elias got off the chair and walked to a corner of the room where there seemed to be enough space to fit him at his largest. He double-checked the drapes - very thick, and fastened shut. "Now I will show you again what a Garou actually is. Please watch and refrain from screaming - they may assume I am breaking your fingers."

With that, he began to concentrate and shift, heightening into the bulk of Glabro form. He paused, then moved on into Crinos. Fur, claws, sharp teeth, bubbling Rage, and he bent forward so as not to bump the ceiling. A count of ten, and he moved on into Hispo, then finally shrunk into lupus. Another count of ten, and he dropped back into homid. "Now, would you please come here?"

Aleksandr, looking on, finally blinked as he got to his feet. He half-extended the folded handkerchief toward Jokela. "No, keep it," said Jokela. Elias translated, and Aleksandr put it into his pocket before joining Elias in the corner.

"Circumstances are unusual," said Elias, "so it would be helpful if you continued to refrain from howling and so on. Do you believe you can do that?" He got a nod. "Your clothes have been dedicated for you, so that they will not be damaged when you change forms."

"Oh."

"Would you like to ask me something?"

"When you touched me like that." Even at the memory Aleksandr cringed with obvious humiliation (at least, it was obvious _now_). "After..."

"After you attempted to knife me?"

He looked away. "Yes. After that. That was dedicating?"

"Yes. I am afraid I took an excessive liberty in that case. I discovered shortly afterward that the procedure was unnecessary."

"Oh."

"I apologize."

Aleksandr opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "What do you want me to do?"

"Do you happen to remember any dreams in the past weeks of being a wolf?" A nod. "Those are normal for cubs near the First Change - the First Change is the first time a young Garou shifts forms. We believe you have already experienced your First Change, though you may not entirely remember it as such. The First Change is nearly always paired with frenzy. Frenzy is berserk rage or mindless panic, fight or flight. Many Garou do not remember what happens while they are in frenzy, so I do not expect you to remember _that,_ but do you remember any time when you might have been upset in some way, even a small way, and perhaps blacked out for a time?"

"Yes," said Aleksandr eventually. A hand drifted up to his chest. "I remember the White - I remember they - I remember the encirclement was being destroyed. After that... I think I was shot."

There _had_ been a motti finished off on the night of the howling, he remembered, one that had been pinched off west of his camp. "Please continue. What do you remember afterward? What do you think you might remember?"

"I think I was bleeding. Then I think I was in the snow. My clothes were in pieces, most of them. And I saw a bird..." He trailed off, biting his lip. "I thought the bird... meant something."

"It might have. Do you remember what sort of bird?"

"Not really. It was high up. Over the trees."

"Please continue."

"After that, I dreamed I was a wolf. For a while I dreamed I ran after the bird. Then I woke up and I was at the village, the, did you call it..."

"The sept," Elias put in. That dropped some definite hints as to how he'd reached the bawn, no matter the sort of bird.

"At the sept. I saw I had a scar then. Where I remembered being shot."

"Please continue."

"I hadn't had it before, but it looked... so _old_."

"Most wounds heal at a greatly increased rate in other forms. Most of these wounds do not even leave scars. Yours must have been particularly severe. It is quite likely that your First Change saved your life." Maybe, as late as it came, he actually _needed_ life-threatening injury to push him all the way, especially since he hadn't already popped in the motti. "Now, let us see if you can transform of your own accord. Take your time..."

He found himself repeating the same instructions he had in the forest. This time, though, Aleksandr nodded along, Aleksandr's shoulders were rigid, and he bit down on his lower lip so hard that another moment, Elias kept thinking, and he would draw blood. "Mind the ceiling," Elias added, double-checking that he was at a safe distance. "And the walls. But primarily, remember those dreams. Do you remember what it felt like? Try to capture that."

A few more minutes of this, which felt like hours, and Aleksandr caught it. His frame swept upward; Elias, taking another step back, wanted to tell him to mind the ceiling again, but he had already leaned forward in anticipation. He paused there, in Crinos, gathering himself for the second half of the sequence, and then he dropped back down, leaning over further, and hit the floor on all fours. Another pause there, at the last hurdle, before the Hispo dwindled and a lean wolf with a silver-white coat sat before him on his haunches.

"You did well," Elias told him. "Walk around if you like. Become accustomed to it." Aleksandr stumbled and then walked in circles, tail moving in spasms as he got used to controlling it, and Elias saw the ever-so-slightly darker streaks in the silver that weren't just the play of lamplight. He had no reason to find fault; his own mottled coat, all gray but not the same gray, raised the eyebrows of the die-hard Fenrir purists.

"That's good," he heard Jokela murmur behind him. Finnish, Russian. "That's good."

Eventually Aleksandr paused and turned around to look at him again. "Have you had your fill for the moment?" A nod. He found the sight of the wolf's head going up and down inexplicably endearing. "This stage should be easier. Now, call to mind what you are accustomed to being. Your natural form. Let go, and fall back."

It happened far faster accordingly, leaving Aleksandr sitting on the floor with his legs sprawled, staring between his hands and feet with almost as much amazement as if he were a lupus or metis, if human shape were new to him as well. "_Oh_," and was Elias fooling himself when he thought he heard not only surprise but pleasant surprise?

"Do you see now?"

The balance tipped again, the surprise clearing to leave only wary confusion. Aleksandr nodded. This time Elias could tell he was only nodding along, trying to keep him happy, back to captor and prisoner. As long as he knew this, and knew to keep working on it.

"Good," he echoed Jokela as Aleksandr regained his feet. "That is very good. You are doing well. We have a few more hours tonight, after which we need to collaborate on something for the captain to write down. Would you like to practice? I can explain the five forms to you."


	4. In the Blood

** Chapter Four: In the Blood **

When Laukkanen lay down at Aleksandr's back, Aleksandr's spine became rigid as a steel bar and he fought off remnants of dread. But they all slept this way in the close space of the dugout, he knew, and he managed to calm himself eventually.

Laukkanen's cousin Koskinen was there when Aleksandr woke the next morning. He said what was probably "good morning" - the same phrase Veikko taught him, several mornings ago - and led him to a field kitchen for breakfast. The soldiers there shifted around them at first, drawing wide, and then enclosed and absorbed without trouble - so untroublesome that Aleksandr could almost pretend he belonged there. Koskinen pushed his hands in and out of his pockets. The cook stared at him briefly before seeming to slide him into mental place. When his turn came the cook served him with the same efficient gestures and neutral demeanor as he served the Finns.

Aleksandr finished eating first. Koskinen noticed this, smiled at him, and asked a question he didn't understand. "I'm sorry," he began to say, but Koskinen waved it off.

Once Koskinen finished, Aleksandr ventured, "Laukkanen?"

Koskinen reached for his rifle but didn't touch it. Instead it was a phantasmal rifle that he shouldered and peered down; it was his abortive gesture that made Aleksandr fairly sure what he was playing at. Koskinen adjusted his phantom aim and clicked his tongue several times in rapid succession. Aleksandr could understand that, too, well enough, though he might have liked not to. As it was he took it as a reminder that all the talk of teaching aside, he was still a prisoner and Laukkanen was still killing his comrades. And what was he teaching? Laukkanen turning into a wolf (and those other shapes in between, Glabro and Crinos and Hispo he called them) and Laukkanen not doing what Aleksandr feared he would didn't mean Laukkanen was right about everything else. Surely not all werewolves were Whites.

Still, Aleksandr knew, he knew much less about being a werewolf than Laukkanen did. He should at least listen, think it over before deciding how wrong it was.

Maybe even, a little bit, how wrong it wasn't...?

Later that silent morning he ventured again, this time to take out the cigarette the other White had given him last night. When he showed it to Koskinen, Koskinen immediately produced one of his own out of his inexhaustible pockets and lit up for both of them. "Thank you," Aleksandr told him with his scant Finnish (he knew for sure now what _kiitos_ meant; Captain Jokela had let him look in his dictionary). Koskinen muttered something in reply. They smoked outside the dugout, shielding the flame with their hands. Aleksandr, inhaling, noticed the differences from the kind he'd had before, from its construction to its scent.

He had another one left, in his other pocket next to the folded handkerchief glued together with snot; the captain had given this to him as well, after the interrogation. The interrogation was short, demanding little, and fairly painless; nothing new in the way of pain, only revisiting it when he thought of Golubev and the rest who likely weren't werewolves to get up so readily after a shot to the chest.

The trickiest part was when Laukkanen held up his Komsomol card and asked about it. Aleksandr explained best as he could. "It's the youth branch of the Party."

"Does it have very many members?"

"Everyone I know at home who can join has."

For some reason, this seemed to relieve Laukkanen.

Afterward Laukkanen had explained the story they'd put down: after the encirclement was destroyed (the motti, Laukkanen called it, another Finnish word, to do with bundling and chopping firewood) he'd wandered his way not to the sept, which was secret, but to Heikki's house (Heikki Saarinen, he learned now), where Heikki officially lived with his mother and little brother (and his father, but his father was at war too, Aleksandr gathered). There they'd tended to him for a few days, given him time to recuperate, given him warm clothes to replace his filthy uniform. Then Heikki had gone to deliver him to the camp. "And then we gave him a scolding," Laukkanen had said, laughing the way he did, "said he could've walked right into a motti if he hadn't been lucky."

Another part of the real story, as Laukkanen told it, was that the sept "Warder" had found him near the sept, in its sphere of influence as it were, in human form, naked and unconscious (Laukkanen looked like he wanted to say something more about that circumstance, some joke maybe, but he bit it back to Aleksandr's relief). His identification capsule had hung from a string, tucked beneath his missing tunic; the fraying string gave out at the sept, but at the time it was long enough that it stayed around his neck through everything. She'd brought him in and before the next snowfall she'd retraced his scent and his footprints to the churned and blood-spattered patch of snow where he probably first changed shape, retrieving the gear scattered along the way. She'd picked up some smaller items like the Komsomol badge on his tunic and the spoon in the top of his boot, but she'd drawn the line at tracking down the shreds of his uniform and the buttons of his hat - buttons, he could visualize now, that had given way and left the budenovka to come off relatively intact.

He still couldn't remember exactly what had happened in the forest after the cuckoo shot him, and if what Laukkanen said was right he probably never would; the explanation he'd been given remained the simplest to be had, assuming his own sanity. He'd tripped _something_ inside himself last night, hadn't he? He'd felt his bones and flesh shift, hadn't he, and seen it, seen the hair and then fur spring up over his hands, seen the claws come out? Hadn't all the smells been so much sharper?

* * *

This wasn't quite the war Galliards liked to sing about most, not with all this sitting around and melting into the woods after each strike, but if the Finns at large tried to fight such a war they'd now be red smears on the tank treads, so Elias worked with what worked for humans and hoped to bag another one today.

The job Elias landed meant there was an especial amount of sitting and waiting and hiding involved. His (lack of) height was an aid here; it made it easier for him to squeeze up in position. Kustaa was his partner today; he was taller, so his options were more limited and he had to pay more attention to where his head was bobbing, but Kustaa was good at that and an excellent shot himself. If Kustaa was born Garou, he would've been an Ahroun like his father; in that case, Elias thought, he could've been twice as lethal. Or maybe not; maybe he was only so good at human things because he didn't have the chance to even be _bad_ at Garou things.

Toivo had told him once about a thing the Bone Gnawers had thought up called the High Ban. What it was, was that a Bone Gnawer could fuddle around in human causes all they liked, as long as they didn't bring their advantages into it. No shifting, no Gifts, no stepping sideways unless it was that or die - and in that case they had to _play_ dead, as their cause went.

"How do they explain that to the humans?" Elias had asked. "The playing dead bit? I mean, on the outside it'd look like desertion, wouldn't it?"

"Hell if I know," said Toivo. "Never tried it."

"That's a surprise." Toivo was so humanlike in every other way.

Toivo snorted. "Not as if there's much of a chance to, out here."

Interesting that Bone Gnawers had set a rule like that, straight out. Elias supposed other tribes all had something like it, in practice - a lot of the time taking Crinos on a crowded battlefield could cause more problems than it solved. But he knew that in the Great War, packs of Fenrir running with various armies hadn't been too worried about using their advantages. Some of this might've been cancelled out by fighting with each other, but that wasn't at all better. At least this history lesson had been delivered from a vantage point of lofty exasperation with _other_ Fenrir who got so wrapped up in this sort of thing. That kind of pointless squabbling hadn't happened in Finland, or Norway and Sweden for that matter. Not then. But the civil war that had come after... that was more of a muddle.

He remembered Toivo talking again about that, the bitter edge of his voice, and shunted the thoughts away with some effort, eventually by a flight of fancy: Maybe the next one he shot would be a Russian Garou, too, and would pop off into the Umbra. Well, if that came back to bother him it would be in a different way, wondering if they'd commit to playing dead or if they'd pop up in camp of an evening. It would make him think of Aleksandr in one way, instead of the other, which was thinking what if this was a big-eyed kid like him, dying for such a stupid reason? Elias was pretty sure _he_ wasn't being stupid. For him this was definitely a war worth fighting. But for _them_?

Someday this would be over. And when it was over, he couldn't wait to get back to ripping up Banes (an _over_ where he couldn't get back to that wasn't to be considered). He could feel entirely good about ripping up Banes, didn't have to think about if the Banes had mothers and fathers and siblings and wives and children. Fomori, though. Ugh. Had to be done, not like you could drag each and every one of them off to the Children of Gaia to be scrubbed out (even the Children of Gaia admitted this), but. No, straight-up Banes were the thing. The purity of an utter lack of... humanity? Not the best word, was it? ... lack of anything to be the slightest bit guilty about. Back to something like the war of ballads.

Ballads, epics. Not his field of study, but given the sept's bumper crop of Galliards he couldn't help but pick up some things. And because he could get away with it as a Ragabash, he'd picked up bits and pieces of Fianna imports that the Galliards considered beneath their dignity (Answers-Storm, Jalmari) or were still of an age to be perplexed by (Kalevi, Veikko). Besides the usual love in a loud clinging maudlin way, there was forbidden love in a quiet ashamed tragical way - between packmates or between members of feuding tribes or whatnot, but gigantic messes whichever way they spun it because the heroes in these tales could never help but give in to their impulses and damn the womb-ripping consequences. He hadn't concentrated on these songs. Back then he'd had no reason to - even Kolya wasn't Garou, after all, no matter how much his father had wanted him to be. Really, he still didn't have reason to, because love had nothing to do with it.

A likely-looking movement, _there_. He concentrated.

* * *

After lunch Laukkanen came into the dugout with Ruotsalainen and said hello to him before flopping to the floor, asleep. Ruotsalainen followed not long after, and Koskinen left - maybe taking his own turn at shooting people. Aleksandr continued what exercises he could in the small space and afterward sat beside them feeling useless. It wasn't as if he could practice shifting in here. Then again, if he were useful here it would be to the enemy. The Whites were still the enemy and boredom was a small sacrifice to make.

But when Laukkanen finally woke up he looked to Aleksandr, said something that sounded like a curse, dug through his bag, and produced two books. Chekhov and Tolstoy, he saw on the spines. "This is hardly innovative of me, I am aware," said Laukkanen, passing it over. "I hope you have not chanced to read them before."

Aleksandr picked up the Chekhov - a collection of stories - and opened to the table of contents, studded with titles he recognized. "Some of it, I think." Some from school, some on his own time. "But I liked them," he hastened to add.

"Fortuitous indeed," said Laukkanen. "Now, I will be away this evening and anticipate another 'interrogation' in the early morning. You should sleep before then."

Aleksandr nodded. He wasn't sure whether to push away the thought of what Laukkanen would be doing again while he was away or to cling to it, a reminder. He couldn't rely on political officers for that anymore. He ought to have the consciousness to handle this.

He started rereading the Chekhov, a piece of familiarity even with the puzzling letters in this edition, as Laukkanen left the dugout. Then Laukkanen returned, in the process of downing coffee, the White who'd given him the cigarette in tow and looking vaguely discomfited.

"Aleksandr Sergeyevich," Laukkanen told him, "I would like to introduce you to Fredrik Martti Salo." And then, turning toward Salo, he spoke in Finnish, with _Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov_ in it.

Aleksandr's spine straightened as he remembered - it had taken this reminder. The thing he'd asked of Laukkanen last night had been forgotten in the ensuing furor. Laukkanen said he wasn't going to kill him, he remembered, Laukkanen said what did it matter, the whole rigmarole, when he was going to go home. Laukkanen _said_.

_Come home_.

Laukkanen had been continuing to talk to Salo, who looked further discomfited, and now he turned back. "I was informing him that you share a name with another of my cousins. Alex - Alexander - is considerably younger than Tapio and I, and younger than you are, for that matter. Fifteen."

"Oh."

Laukkanen put his free hand out toward Aleksandr's head. He flinched and Laukkanen yanked his hand back as though he had contrived to set his hair alight. "I apologize," he muttered, already leading Salo back out.

* * *

This time Elias served as part of a larger group, picking off men around the perimeter, skiing from point to point, helping to take out a machine gun emplacement, eventually joining their final dispersion into the forest. Results: two wounded - Mikael Aalto and Lieutenant Lind - and a lot more who were more than wounded inside the motti. But still more held out. Surely they didn't _all_ think they'd be raped to death if they gave up. He wanted to ask Aleksandr sometime exactly where he'd gotten the idea; at the same time, he dreaded hearing that it was all thanks to his own idiocy.

For now Jokela hovered around Mikael and Lind in the house, muttering encouragement as they made preparations to take the pair to a field hospital. If Elias knew him he'd be slipping in applications of his Gift - it was because it was so watered-down that he could get away with it. A little less in the way of blood loss and gangrene was easier to brush off than yanking a broken body from death's door. Elias stayed just long enough to confirm that they were still on for the next session.

Aleksandr had taken his advice. This time he curled on the floor of the dugout, wrapped in Elias's blanket. This time Elias kept his hands behind his back while he crouched (he'd gotten in trouble for this before, when he was younger - he was too ready to get in close, to poke at people, hadn't he learned _anything_ in the last decade?), starting with a whisper and working his way louder until Aleksandr blinked up at him once, twice, still wary. If in this moment Aleksandr were to say _I love you_ there was no way he would mean it. Elias wasn't a complete idiot - he could understand this.

Aleksandr got up quickly, putting on his boots and taking up his hat. That hat, thought Elias, with its blatant red star, was the biggest visible sign. Take it off, take a picture, and he might as well be one of their own kitted out in model Cajander. A lesser model, a city boy's, without even a white sheet to appropriate for snow camouflage, and of course no hat. I should get you a decent one, he thought, and bit his tongue on it, because for one thing where would he get it out here? Nicking a knitted cap from the home-front contributions? He'd have to sneak into another camp for that; his own company was well-outfitted by this point. He could imagine the look on the industriously patriotic knitter's face if she ever found out.

They went back up to the house, back into what had been (and would be, would be!) the bedroom. Some looks from the others hanging around inside; Elias waved gaily at them before closing the door. Jokela hadn't gotten back yet, so Elias gestured extravagantly between the table and the bed. Aleksandr chose the table and Elias seated himself in Jokela's usual chair, noting how the table was again cleared of any papers and dispatches - Jokela knew how things stood.

They didn't need Jokela to talk - or, really, for Elias to talk. Aleksandr sat there with big eyes, nodding and nodding when asked if he understood; Elias didn't think all his explanations could be _that_ perfect. Now Elias could see why, but that didn't make it much less aggravating. "You are aware you _can_ ask questions if you wish," he said after his sketchy little lecture on caern and sept and a little bit on totem spirits of tribe and caern and pack, from Great Fenris to the Snow Queen (he was sure Aleksandr had wanted to say _something_ when he mentioned Cuckoo), but all that got him was another nod.

Maybe, Elias started to think, if he could just be persuaded to talk long enough he'd figure out that the sky wasn't going to cave in on him if he talked on his own. And nothing was going to cave in. After last night what else could get to him?

"You have become acquainted with Veikko, have you not?" he said after explaining the three breeds. Aleksandr nodded. "He is the youngest of us - how old do you suppose he is?"

"Twelve?"

"In truth, he will become four this May."

Aleksandr looked like he wanted to say something more at that, exactly as intended, and Elias stopped talking accordingly until Aleksandr said "I'm sorry. Fourteen?"

"Oh no," said Elias. "Four. Yes, there is no need to doubt your ears. Veikko Ruotsalainen, you see, is a lupus. His true name is Smallest-Of-Litter. His mother is one of our wolf Kinfolk, and his father is Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm. Ilmari-rhya is homid, but it is the breed of the mother that matters. After all, it is the mother that must carry and then birth a child in a proper shape."

Aleksandr's eyes were wider than usual. Elias waited again another little stretch before asking "Does this shock you?"

Aleksandr flushed and nodded again.

"I admit, it is not an entirely usual mating practice. In the majority of cases, our homids look to human Kin and our lupus look to wolves. There is more in the way of common interests. Our wolf Kin are more intelligent than one might imagine, however. Also, in this particular case, by the time of Veikko's birth Ilmari-rhya - _rhya_, by the by, is an honorific suffix among we Garou indicating respect for one higher in rank - had already made several attempts with his human wife, leading to five human children along with Veikko's siblings. You have met the eldest of them."

"Oh."

"Have you noticed a brotherly resemblance?"

"Um. Not exactly, but... Kustaa Ruotsalainen, Ilmari-rhya... he was... the man at the... sept...?"

"Yes, Ilmari-rhya would be 'the' man at the sept in these times." Though Heikki and Olavi and Kalevi would still agitate to be counted as such. "They inform me that you have met him."

He nodded. He didn't look appalled any longer at the prospect of wolf-fucking, but it was replaced with a distant apprehension. As if he was remembering the meeting, and not liking the memory.

"I don't suppose he was particularly gentle with you. There is no need to fret as to its significance. Ilmari-rhya is not particularly gentle with anyone, though I suspect Veikko may be an exception proving the rule. Can you suppose why that might be?" He was starting to feel a little ridiculous now.

Aleksandr nodded again, and waited again before finally speaking. "You said before," he said, carefully, "that he was trying for something. You said he had more children already, so it wasn't trying for children. So he was trying for... a werewolf?"

"Yes, that is exactly it. You see, outside of particular bloodlines, the average probability of a Garou child is in the area of one in ten births in the optimal case, that of a Garou mating with Kin. Two Kinfolk may sometimes produce a Garou child, but the probability is even smaller. Two Garou, of course, invariably produce a metis, and I have told you why this is problematic. Can you suppose the problem _this_ would present?"

"Well... not many people have ten children. And on average a... a Garou would need to have ten children to have another Garou. So... are there fewer every generation?"

"You are exactly right," said Elias, and thought that he would have made an awful schoolteacher. "Viability is a definite concern in this era. Lupus tend to mate more often individually, but overall we also have fewer lupus now than we would like. Therefore, it is of great importance to the future of the Garou Nation for us to have as many children as we _can_ have."

He remembered Kolya saying this, not in so many words, looking embarrassed to have to explain this to someone who ought to know it already. Elias had been sixteen then but that wasn't much excuse; sixteen was old enough to kill and to fuck and to have some sense about it. He remembered Kolya talking about Father, Kolya's father, much like Kustaa did now about Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm, except that Viktor Fire-Eye was dead and hence even more inviolate. Talking about how Father had wanted someone to carry on the family line (was he echoing his mother, or eavesdropping, or had Fire-Eye told this to a six-year-old? Elias had never found a good time to ask), and how he couldn't just throw that away, could he?

Kolya hadn't been all that eager about the prospect of being arrested for sodomy, either. Elias's tribemates probably wouldn't have turned them in because if nothing else it would deprive Gaia of a warrior for the length of the prison sentence (and it wasn't as if it was charach), but other people wouldn't know about Gaia and even the ones who did know might not think it entirely through. Maybe they never would've been caught (you _could_ keep secrets like that forever, the Veil hadn't been torn to pieces yet had it?), but considering the other reasons not to, why chance it?

Though they'd taken one chance, all the same.

Aleksandr turned in his chair and stood as Jokela came through the door, looking worn. Elias hopped to his feet himself. He considered taking to the bed, decided against it, and instead seated himself on the edge of the cleared table. It was sturdy, good craftsmanship, and held his weight without trouble.

Jokela said in Russian, without even consulting the dictionary, "Good evening."

Aleksandr echoed the greeting, looking as though he couldn't decide what to do with his hands.

"Good morning, rather," said Elias. Jokela favored that with a quirk of the lip before taking his accustomed seat. Behind Elias, papers rustled. Aleksandr turned around to face them and then looked down at the chair, pulled it further back, sat down again.

"Now then," said Elias, trying to remember where he had been headed, what else a cub ought to know, how to segue, "I was saying that members of some bloodlines do not follow the general average of the Garou birthrate, was I not?"

"Yes."

"That is but one of their qualities. These bloodlines are each attached to a particular tribe - have I mentioned the tribes?"

"Yes. I think it was about their spirits?"

"Oh yes." A brief explanation of the concept and onward. "Now, membership in a tribe is composed of several elements. Consent is essential - the cub must petition the tribal totem, and the totem must accept. But as to which tribe to petition, a cub's lineage is most often the guide. This is especially the case with these special bloodlines. These bloodlines are descended from exemplars of the tribe, and carry on their echoes. Do you understand me thus far?"

"Yes." From the look on his face he probably meant no.

"Such bloodlines come to pass through factors such as a long lineage of one's esteemed ancestors who have joined the same tribe. This reveals itself in their descendants' very appearance. Even before they have joined the tribe themselves, and a very few do not, they bear the mark of the tribe in their features. All Garou can recognize this, even if they are uneducated in such matters and not sure what they are recognizing. This is the case for both Garou and Kin. Part of the reason you were recognized as a cub, besides circumstantial factors, is that you bear such a look."

"Oh."

"The tribe in question is known as the Silver Fangs."

"Oh." Did Elias detect another inflection there, suggesting familiarity? They'd asked him about it at the sept, he remembered from Heikki and Veikko's account; he hadn't understood them then, but maybe he was remembering it from there.

"One of the traits unique to the Silver Fangs is this very matter. Other tribes have a small proportion of Garou with such storied ancestries; some tribes have fewer than average and some tribes, the urrah, have none at all. All Silver Fangs, on the other hand, are of such bloodlines. They are, as a consequence, easily recognizable. Their oldest stronghold is Russia, and they can be found in any number of locales across the world, but regardless of nationality, they share a common demeanor -" Maybe not the right word, Aleksandr's would be if anything an uncommon demeanor for them. "- and in the shape of a wolf, their coats are always some permutation of silver or white. This is the superficial way of putting it."

Aleksandr watched him, maybe wondering if he needed to ask what the unsuperficial way was.

And here it came. Elias thought of Viktor Fire-Eye, of the Varangian Fenrir, and then of the toppled House of Romanov, and tried not to distract himself imagining what Aleksandr's reaction would be when he would see it for himself in another minute. "The Silver Fangs are also our traditional leaders, and from time immemorial they have occupied a similar role in the human world. They are concerned with the preservation of their strong bloodlines, and their Kinfolk are similarly concerned. Everywhere possible, you see, they select their Kin from the ranks of the human nobility, and often from their royalty."

As he spoke, a spasm crossed Aleksandr's face. For fractions of a moment he looked appalled again, horrified, terrified, even for a fraction of a fraction as though he might laugh (and what would he look like when he laughed? Elias had never seen him even smile). His mouth opened slightly, as if to speak. But again, when the spasm settled, it closed and he said nothing, just kept staring with his eyes large and summer-sky light.

"You surely must have questions now?"

Aleksandr's mouth worked again, silently running over the words a few times before his voice came back. "I... my... my parents work in a factory."

"I can certainly imagine why. Russia may be their oldest stronghold, but in the present day it is not as though 'aristocrat' is still considered a valid occupation, is it?"

"They _always_ worked," said Aleksandr, in the most forceful tone Elias had heard from him since the standoff in the tree. "In the old days, even. That was where they met. In the factory. And my father's parents worked too, in the city, and my mother's were peasants - poor peasants, not even kulaks."

Elias wondered what a kulak was. He could ask later. "They may have been, but that does not change what I see in you. Nor does it change what the others have seen in you. Perhaps someone in your family took it upon themselves to invent a less troublesome background." Aleksandr's head twitched, like he wanted to shake it. "Or perhaps someone engaged in a spot of adultery."

This time he did shake it. "They wouldn't have."

"Or perhaps not. But at _some_ point in your ancestry, there must have been a Silver Fang. This ancestor is probably not terribly removed; otherwise you would likely not still bear the look as strongly as you do."

In the very act of denial the Silver Fang look showed itself stronger in Aleksandr's face, in the way he drew himself even taller. "They wouldn't have."

Not only talking to him but talking _back_, oh joyous hour. Elias tried not to smile; he could only imagine what Aleksandr would make of _that_, and again he'd be half-right, because Elias was amused as well as gratified - knowing as he did that _someone_ would have, and had. "Be that as it may."

"Is this why you talk like that?"

Elias couldn't hold back his guffaw. He composed himself as quickly as he could - wouldn't want to undo his progress. "Partially, I suppose. I first learned Russian in order to communicate with Silver Fang emigres; far easier, you see, than expecting them to learn Finnish, and usable in settings where the High Tongue would be unsuitable. They tend to stand on ceremony - maybe even more than they did in Russia. I'll try to be more informal, if you would like. Would you?"

Already Aleksandr was shrinking back down. "Yes. Please. The High Tongue?"

"Oh yes. The Garou Nation's common language. I'll be teaching you, or at any rate someone will be."

"What does it sound like?"

"Well..." Elias leaned forward and said, lowering his voice and switching to High Tongue, "it sounds something like _this_. They tried it with you before, yes?"

A flash of recognition, which didn't quite dispel the lingering wide-eyed shock, and Aleksandr nodded. "Oh."

Back to Russian. "I'd like to ask you about your dreams again, especially recently. Wolves - anything else?"

He hesitated. "The encirclement... the motti?"

Elias winced. "I was thinking more in the line of anything... unusual. Maybe something that seems as though it comes from the past? From someone else's memory?"

The vestiges of shock were starting to fade into the too-familiar sick anxiety. But he said, "Yes."

"Could you tell me about it? Or them?"

"A woman on a horse, in fancy clothes. It was a forest like this one. She was meeting with Finns. I don't know how I know they were Finns. They had old-fashioned weapons, swords and things, and knives..." He glanced toward Elias's puukko. "She didn't speak Finnish, but she spoke French. I don't know how I know it was French. And... the High Tongue, too, when that didn't work."

"Ah."

"Is that good?"

"You probably had an ancestor who visited the sept, long ago. That would explain how you found your way to it - if she knew the way. And knew you ought to introduce yourself, which would explain why you were howling like that. I could hear it from _here_." Aleksandr flushed. "The bird you mentioned, too - it might have been a spirit. A falcon-spirit, even. Falcon is the totem of the Silver Fangs, you see."

"Oh."

"It's a talent, for some. Getting in contact with their ancestors and channeling them. I can't tell you much about that, since I don't have the knack myself. But I think it would be good if you tried it. Contemplated and meditated and such, you know. It might help with figuring out where they cut in on those workers and peasants of yours. Can you try that?"

"I'll try that." He said it though it looked like one of the last things he wanted to do (probably not one of the _very_ last, couldn't be _that_ bad).

"Soon I'll send a message by spirit to those Russian Silver Fangs I mentioned. They'll have records and so on. They'll want to take your measure, and they can explain most things better than I can, especially things to do with the tribe."

"Oh."

"Rendezvousing might be tricky. After all, I can't exactly drag you across the countryside to whatever semi-ancestral manor they've settled down in, yes? And they can't exactly waltz into camp - especially since for a lot of the older ones their Finnish and Swedish is still pretty bad." He grinned. Aleksandr didn't. "But we'll work something out or I'm no Ragabash. Which brings me to the auspices."

* * *

Was this it? Aleksandr kept wondering, even while he listened to Laukkanen explain about how the werewolves divided themselves by moon phases to determine their roles in society. All along, had it been that? Some aristocratic ancestor, and had some buried piece of him known this from the beginning? Was that why he'd always been so nervous about saying something wrong, doing something wrong? Was this why, so often in the workers' paradise, when they'd built socialism and everywhere life was supposed to be more and more cheerful, he hadn't been happy?

His mother and father weren't like that. His grandmother on his mother's side wasn't like that. His aunt Taisiya and his cousin Yulia weren't like that, not really. Fyodor wasn't like that, and Mikhail certainly wasn't - and Mikhail matched him near exactly, as body and blood went. No, it was all down to him, him and his thoughts like wanting Isayev.

And what kind of leader would _he_ make? If it were true, it would just point out a glaring flaw of that kind of father-to-son system. And of course the idea that it was true stayed utterly ridiculous.

Still, there was the one time...

"Now you," said Laukkanen, "according to the charts they drew up at the sept, you're a Philodox. Half-moon. Those are judges, mediators. Law and honor. And you're stuck with me. It's strange how that happens." In reference, Aleksandr supposed, to Laukkanen being a Ragabash. New moon. Tricksters and questioners. Cunning and laughter.

The crescent moon was Theurges. Priests of sorts, except they worked with something real (but didn't religious folk all think so?). Mystics who had the most truck with spirits. Aili-rhya and Marita-rhya at the sept were Theurges.

"Galliards, now. That's the gibbous moon. Our sept has a lot of those. They're our lorekeepers..."

So on, and so forth, and it all still seemed incredibly arbitrary. After finishing his declamation on the caste associated with the full moon, those supposed to be especially specialized as warriors, Laukkanen yawned and threw his arms in the air, stretching out as he pushed off the table to land on his feet. "Right, I've had it with education for a little while. Give me time to get ready for the next stretch. Are you tired?"

"No."

"Good. I've got a few hours left in me yet. Either way, I'll grab us all some coffee. You two enjoy yourselves."

A brief exchange with the captain, presumably reporting his intention, and Laukkanen departed. The captain smiled at him. Aleksandr couldn't scrape one up in return.

The next time someone came in, it wasn't Laukkanen. This one saluted the captain and then looked over at him; the captain said something to him in a reassuring tone and waved Aleksandr off the chair while saying "Please?" Aleksandr withdrew to the bed as they conversed in low voices. Papers rustled, were exchanged, and the White left, looking over his shoulder at Aleksandr again as he did. Aleksandr waited until he'd left before drifting back to the chair.

Laukkanen came back juggling the coffee and passed it around with exaggerated sighs of relief. For now, Aleksandr held it with both hands and savored the smell. Laukkanen took several gulps and set the remainder on the table beside him. "I was wondering," said Laukkanen, stretching his arms over his head again. "But you said you have brothers?"

He'd said so, he remembered, when he was pleading with Laukkanen last night. Where was this going? "Yes. Two."

"Older or younger than you?"

"Fyodor's younger. Mikhail's my age."

"You're twins?"

"Yes." His mother said Aleksandr had been born first, squalling a storm (and that was by far the loudest he'd been in his life, was how she capped it off). He saw no need to share that. "Does that mean...?"

"Does that mean he's Garou too?"

"Yes?"

"It's not impossible, it's happened before, but I wouldn't bet on it. And it wouldn't be because of being your twin. Being Garou doesn't work like that. It's to do with the spirit."

"Oh." If it was to do with the spirit, why was there all this talk about bloodlines?

"Are they in the army too?"

"Mikhail is." Where was this _going_?

"_Perkele_. Has he been shipped here too?"

"I don't know. He wasn't, last I knew, but that was weeks ago."

"Oh. Well. I hope he doesn't get killed out here. That would be too bad."

From someone else, one of his comrades, Aleksandr could take it as something strictly personal, could admit that if Mikhail were to die out here he didn't know what he'd do, what he _could_ do, and to _him_ that would be bad - but coming from Laukkanen, coming from a White Finn (which he was, after all) he couldn't help but think: what did that make the deaths of everyone else the White Finns had killed? What did that make Kozlov, burned alive? What did that make Malinovsky, the angles of his face made even more prominent with starvation the last time Aleksandr had seen him? What did that make Golubev, who'd wanted to set them free? Mildly unfortunate?

Some of this had probably shown on his face because Laukkanen shifted and coughed and even looked away from him for a little bit and said at last, "Well, there's not much to do about it unless I happen to catch sight of him - are you the sort of twins that look the same?"

"Something like that." It was only in positions like asleep (though Mikhail laughed even in his sleep), or obscured (back turned, say, or at night) that anyone who had a passing acquaintance with them had any trouble telling them apart. Mikhail was the one people called handsome.

"I'm sure I could spot him in a crowd. I'll, um. I'll do what I can. Now me, I have a sister. Helena's three years older than me. Your Fyodor, how much younger is he?"

"Almost three years."

"Ah, what a coincidence!" Not so much of a coincidence, surely; considering the number of siblings in the world there had to be thousands that were born three years apart. Laukkanen's cousin sharing a variant of his own name seemed like a bigger coincidence, and it wasn't as though it was a particularly obscure name itself. "She married a few years back - this Theurge from a bigger sept of ours, near Sweden. And I have a little nephew, Seppo, he's Kin, almost four. I haven't seen him for a while but I had better. The last time I did he was still in that stage, you know, when babies look the same. And in her last letter she said she might be expecting again."

"Oh." Was he meant to be happy and hopeful with Laukkanen?

"Tapio's married too. His wife's Kin. They're still trying. And Marita - she's Tapio's sister - she's looking around too, for a man that can keep up with her." When he thought about it they _did_ look quite like one another. "She made adren a year back. We've been in the same pack ever since I Firsted - it took a while to get one together, and we're only three. Marita and Ilmari and I. Ilmari's a different Ilmari from the one you've met. That one's Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm. This one's called Ilmari Pekkala, or Ilmari the Tireless - he's a year younger than me. You have a question?"

"Not really. Pekkala - is that Finnish for tireless?"

"Oh - oh no, it's Finnish for Peter, 'Peter's place.' His human surname. The Finnish for tireless -" And here Laukkanen went on a brief tangent on Finnish adjectives, which Aleksandr put away in case they would be useful. "Anyway, you wouldn't have met him. He's around here, but in a different company. And he's a Philodox, like you are. It's too bad he doesn't speak Russian. He used to say, 'Elias, what _use_ is that? They can speak High Tongue with the rest of us.' Well, apparently not all of them. Ha!"

Aleksandr drank the coffee; he felt as though raising it in front of his face did a small something to shield him from Laukkanen's torrent of chatter. At least it was just chatter.

"You have a cousin, yes?"

"Yes. Her name's Yulia."

"Which side is she from?"

"My mother's."

"How old is she?"

"Seventeen, now."

"Do you know her very well?"

"She lives with us. Her and my aunt." It was going to be temporary, giving them time to get used to Leningrad after arriving from Zimovo. But they couldn't find an apartment for themselves, not with all the other people coming in from the villages with the same idea, and if they were going to have to stuff themselves into a corner it might as well be a corner with family. So they'd shuffled around the beds and he'd shared one with Mikhail and Fyodor for a few further years, embarrassing ones after those dreams started, until his mother tracked down more.

"Ah. Now Marita and Tapio - Helena and I grew up with them. Our aunt and uncle took us in. Our aunt and uncle from our mother's side, you see. Our uncle on my father's side might have but he was all the way in America. That would be cousin Alex's father, by the by. I'm telling the others I'm taking you under my wing because you make me nostalgic about Alex, make me sentimental wondering what he looks like now. He's blond as straw, as it happens, but, details."

_Took us in._

I wonder what you would say if I told you I was an orphan.

Aleksandr thought he might want to say something, but was still relieved when Laukkanen proceeded apace and swept the decision away.

"There are Silver Fangs in America too, you know. They haven't got kings and barons there, except when you're speaking figuratively, but they get by with the figurative. Now, my mother's side of the family is an odd bunch. Over a hundred years ago one of the Koskinen men even up and married a Child of Gaia Ahroun. Best as I've gathered, there was a lot of shouting and challenging and a klaive duel. The Child of Gaia won, so nobody died from it... oh, and a klaive is a sort of dagger, made of silver."

Back to "teacher," and it was with that very shift, with the end to this seemingly-aimless chatter, that he thought of Golubev again - Golubev talking at night about chocolate ice cream and parachute-jumping and all his work in the Komsomol and his summer at the Artek camp when he was in the Pioneers and why his name was Vladimir. Even while he thought of this, and thought of the implications of the comparison, and thought of what Laukkanen might have been aiming at, he was looking to Laukkanen's knife, wondering if he wanted to ask enough to actually do it.

"Oh no," said Laukkanen with a chuckle, "that's only my puukko. It was my mother's and her father's, and I happen to think he did a very good job making it, but there's no spirit in it, at least not yet. If _only_ we had as many klaives as puukot. No, a klaive is something special. Silver is our weakness, you see. It's sacred to Luna. If you're out of your normal form, it'll burn you, and if you carry around too much of it, like in a klaive, it might cut you off from the spirits. You probably won't have that particular problem for a long while. Though who knows, maybe you'll even have a klaive waiting for you with the Silver Fangs. They have the most - of course their name is very fitting, and first share of the kill _does_ go to the greatest in station. That's another rule of the Litany. I'll have to set them out top to bottom soon enough. Would you remind me?"

Aleksandr nodded. The image of some count or baron presenting him with an old treasure of theirs was so incredible that at any other time he might have laughed.

"And the Children of Gaia," Laukkanen went on, "are another tribe. Essentially, we share Finland with them. 'We' is my tribe - the Get of Fenris. Did you ever touch on Germanic lore in school?"

"I don't think so?"

"Good. It's mostly _hevonpaska_... what's the word...?" Behind him, the captain had finished his coffee and was writing something down. "That is, nonsense. Humans got it mixed up. They do that a lot. So, Great Fenris is our totem, and he's a -"

* * *

Elias talked and talked - Fenris and Thor and the Old Man - and tried not to think about his little hoard of vellum communication talens. He couldn't bind spirits to make more, so while he was out on his own they had to be conserved. Questioning Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm on his thought processes wasn't close to a sufficiently urgent use. He'd known this back when Aleksandr arrived, and done his best to pump Heikki and Veikko. They'd been forthcoming, but they weren't exactly privy to those thought processes either.

As handsome as Aleksandr might be (for whatever that was worth, considering Elias couldn't go anywhere with it) Elias had to wonder what he was doing here. He had the Silver Fang look all right, so why not go to the Silver Fangs? They could've taken a moon bridge to their caern and explained things to him in the comfort of the sept. This seemed so simple and obvious a thing to do that he had trouble thinking of why it obviously hadn't happened.

He tried anyway. Maybe Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm wanted to be sure he really was a lost cub, so that he'd be delivered to the Silver Fangs properly labeled (though at this point, delivery would be complicated). Maybe he'd had some paranoia about whatever was going on across the border, imagined that - being as old as nineteen - Aleksandr's not-quite-full-fledged tribal look wasn't because he was a cub but because he was an agent of the Red Bone Gnawers. Maybe, maybe... None of his attempts came up anything close to satisfactory. For whatever reason they'd made the bed, now Elias had to lie in it.

He distracted himself from this distraction by concentrating on repeating the old joke about his deed name - "I'm Hunts-With-Mielikki because Hunts-With-Tapio would be too confusing" - and then, when Aleksandr reminded him, explaining the Litany - and then, with the second rule, turning aside to explain Gaia and the Weaver and the Wyld and the Wyrm as best as he could. He probably should've brought it up earlier, essential facet of existence as it was, but at least he was doing it now.

That took longer than he expected, even though Aleksandr asked no more questions; Elias prompted him a few more times, but his heart wasn't in it. He ended up cutting off partway through after a discreet reminder from Jokela, coupled with a suggestion that absolute privacy wasn't strictly necessary for simple conversation. After all, Jokela pointed out, he was likely the only member of the company fluent enough in Russian to understand the conversation. They withdrew to the front room, where he continued his cobbled-together discourse in whispers while cleaning his rifle. Aleksandr kept his eyes on the rifle throughout, out of what might be both skittishness and envy.

"And next to what we have to fight," he concluded, feeling altogether satisfied and didactic, "all these human wars seem very petty. Though they don't often seem so when you're close by. After all, we _live_ here."

"I," said Aleksandr, and stopped there.

Elias felt himself deflate. "At any rate, I live here."

Another nod.

"Tomorrow - tonight - whenever, you can get in some more practice with shifting. And there's the Umbra, I have to show you the Umbra. Actually, you can practice there. It will save the floors. And... what else...?"

"The Litany?"

He could have kicked himself. "That's right. The Litany. We can finish it now. Now, 'Combat the Wyrm wherever it dwells and whenever it breeds...'"

* * *

"Garou shall not mate with Garou," Aleksandr began in a whisper, in the dim light of the winter morning, and wondered if he was blushing as badly as he feared he was. They'd made their way to the dugout at this point. He lay on his side, propped up by his elbow. Laukkanen lay mirroring him; Aleksandr focused on a spot over his head. "Combat the Wyrm wherever it dwells and whenever it breeds. Respect the territory of another." That one seemed to amuse Laukkanen for some reason. "Accept an honorable surrender." And Laukkanen had lingered on that one. "Submission to those of higher station." His voice flat; if Laukkanen asked for enthusiasm then he would try to feign it. "The first share of the kill for the greatest in station. Do not... you shall not eat the flesh of humans. Respect those beneath you, all are of Gaia." A deep breath. "The Veil shall not be lifted. Do not suffer your people to tend your sickness. The leader may be challenged at any time during peace. The leader may not be challenged during wartime. You shall take no action that causes a caern to be violated."

"Good. That's very good. _I_ didn't memorize it nearly that quickly. Right, then. Next time, the Umbra." Laukkanen paused. "Any questions?"

He said nothing and this time Laukkanen didn't demand an answer. Laukkanen left, and Aleksandr lay down the rest of the way. There wasn't enough light yet to read, and he didn't want to call attention to himself by lighting a lantern. As he'd said he would, he tried to reach out with his thoughts toward the woman in the forest.

He ended up, instead, thinking of the forest itself. After the hours walking in it as well as on the road through it, the days spent in this camp and in the sept hidden between the trees, it no longer inspired as much reflexive fear, but that didn't mean he reveled in it.

From there he thought of Leningrad, its high buildings and overflowing streetcars and progress, progress, always progress. He remembered the communal apartment, the good room his family had secured - home, he thought, generally and in specific. He remembered the days of the First Five-Year Plan, as much of it as he'd seen fit to remember when he was eight and nine. Backwardness, backwardness. A lot of work to be done to catch up, to draw ahead. Finish that and it would all be better.

The work of the Weaver, Laukkanen had said, and the work of the Wyrm. Backwards was good. The village houses with the smoke-blackened ceilings, that was good - though the way Laukkanen talked it sounded like the _really_ proper thing to do might be to dispense with houses altogether. Smash the machinery, raze the cities, and live like the animals they sometimes resembled.

Turning into a wolf didn't make him right.

And the talk of these Silver Fangs, of their noble bloodlines, that was too outrageous. Wouldn't every impressionable person love to be told they were a secret king, or at least wouldn't the Whites think that?

But he remembered, one time years ago, the bad scare he'd had when his mother had written agitated letters and then gone in for questioning, his grandmother going with her. He'd overheard from their whispers afterward that someone had accused his mother of being a former person, an overthrown aristocrat who'd faked her proletarian background. He'd heard his mother telling his father that the accuser probably wanted their room; a smaller family would luxuriate in a space that fit eight people. And that was probably that, because progress or no progress some people _would_ be spiteful. After all, his mother and grandmother had come back from the questioning to tell them this, and nothing had changed afterward, no one called them former again, so it couldn't be true. If there was a shadow of truth to it, it would have come out. He was sure of this. And it was his _mother_, of course she was innocent, he'd been sure of it. Mikhail had said this, over and over: "It's not like she did anything wrong, Sasha. There's nothing to worry about, auntie."

But knowing she was innocent hadn't stopped aunt Taisiya from quietly crying with her head on the table, Yulia and Mikhail trying to rouse her. It hadn't stopped his fear from growing in those long hours he scratched away half-blind at his homework before they reappeared at the door.

He twisted onto his back, wishing he hadn't had the coffee, and reached out again. He didn't know what it would mean if he caught something this time. 


	5. Falcon and Cuckoo

** Chapter Five: Falcon and Cuckoo**

The next time, Laukkanen started by saying he'd written to the Silver Fangs - strictly speaking, to one he was acquainted with, who would pass it on to his elders. Then, as Laukkanen had pledged, they entered the Umbra.

Aleksandr had wondered if alcohol might be involved - if in the end, after this one fantastic thing, the rest would be about as magical and inexplicable as an old-fashioned church service. Why wouldn't werewolves be susceptible to religion? But when the door was latched Laukkanen brought out a small mirror (similar to the one they'd lent him at the sept to shave), and gave him instructions. After minutes of staring in the mirror (laid on the table - Laukkanen explained this was so it wouldn't hit the floor when he vanished) and feeling his eyes go loose and unfocused and several times automatically stopping himself from what felt like some inner fall, almost like falling asleep - Laukkanen, apparently knowing each time it happened, making noises of reassurance - he finally plunged headlong.

"Like it?" Laukkanen eventually asked him from behind him. Aleksandr wondered if it was imagination that he sounded so smug about it. While he hadn't proclaimed skepticism, neither had he put up a pretense of enthusiasm for the idea.

Enthusiasm still wasn't forthcoming, though blank frozen shock now steadily ebbed. Had he seen a place like this in some dream he hadn't quite remembered? It seemed altogether like a dream-place - vague and misted. But there was the moon. The pine trees loomed over them. No walls or ceiling to block them out. No dugouts, no other people, only various somethings flitting here and there.

"The Penumbra," Laukkanen announced. Aleksandr turned and saw him driving something several centimeters deep into what passed for ground. A rag knotted at the top of a branch - a makeshift flag. "I'll try not to take too long, and remind me to check back. If something comes up and they figure out you're not there in _that _world, it might be awkward. I'm leaving this so we know where to step back - the house doesn't exist here, you see. Too new. It might start echoing in a few more years. Now," and he pointed, "have a look at that Gaffling."

* * *

Nobody attacked and nobody barged in on Jokela, so they stepped out of the Penumbra at the end of the lesson without incident. Aleksandr looking lost wasn't exactly infrequent, but he was so evidently distracted by this new revelation that Elias decided that was enough teaching for the night. That wasn't too bad - he needed to pay more attention to his other fellows, anyway. He hadn't made sergeant for nothing.

With the others there was a little more teasing about Aleksandr, even one joke that there'd be a wedding in Jokela's office any day now (if they actually knew the half of it, Elias told himself, they'd likely be more vicious, because maybe some would be secretly all right with men fucking men and others all right with fucking Russians, but _both_? "I wouldn't marry him any more than I'd marry Alex," he told the joker. This was true), but either they accepted it or, after his reprimand to Nieminen, they knew to hide their lack of acceptance.

And many of them grew more accepting of Aleksandr with each day and night, he thought, trying to observe demeanors with all the vigilance he hadn't displayed in the fiasco of a first day. In fact a number, starting with Corporal Salo, seemed almost to adopt him. If Elias was supposedly taking him in as a surrogate kid cousin, they served as the rest of the sprawling extended family - an assortment of gruff uncles and older cousins (always older cousins, despite the actual relativities of some of the birthdays). Aleksandr's Finnish was more than broken - it was shattered, pulverized even, but he made an effort to use it, and this endeared him further to this group; some even took it upon themselves to teach him more in their spare time. One word they taught him was Santeri, short for Aleksanteri, the Finnish form of his name; in this way they rebaptized him (if he'd ever been baptized to begin with; there certainly wasn't the residue of a Kin-Fetch's kiss in evidence). Aleksandr collected vocabulary and cigarettes, had no trouble getting razor blades for shaving and light-ups for the cigarettes; he remained lanky, but he was eating more and it showed.

A few days in, Elias started to see him smiling. Not at him, and they were nervous smiles, still, as he said "Thank you" and so on, but they were a pleasant surprise, maybe even gratifying, except in the grand scheme how much had _he _done to bring them on? This was underlined when he mentioned it to Jokela. "I wasn't sure he _could _smile," he said.

"He could," said Jokela. "He did on the first night, but you weren't there at the time."

"When was that?"

"After I checked his ankle."

After Jokela _healed _his ankle, he meant (this being in his office with an open door), and Elias told himself it was ridiculous to be so disappointed about it.

* * *

Aleksandr smoked more often now. Before, when tobacco happened to come into his possession, there was always someone who wanted it more than he did, so he kept giving it to Mikhail or otherwise trading it away for something more appealing (did this count as speculation, he wondered when he was especially nervous). But now some of the Finns plied him with cigarettes which he found he preferred to the ones at home, and there wasn't anyone to pass them to, so he occasionally indulged himself; the stock in his pockets continued to grow.

He was smoking outside, Salo beside him, when he saw a group of Finns entering the camp in triumph with a well-fed horse hauling a sled. The sled was painted white and piled high with supplies, and when it came closer he saw the boxes and cans and barrels were labeled in Russian. Meat, beans, tea, soup powder, bread, butter. Spoils from another destroyed encirclement? They dragged all this to the field kitchen as Aleksandr stared after them, the cigarette burning down in his hand until Salo said "Santeri!" in warning.

Later that night Laukkanen explained, with some embarrassment (at least there was that), that they intercepted messages and faked aerial signals so that the planes dropping food into the encirclements dropped it on the Finns instead. "Sometimes they get wise and drop Molotov's sort of bread," Laukkanen said, by which he meant bombs (for some reason Molotov the foreign minister, not Stalin or even Voroshilov as he might have supposed, was the symbolic target of their ire, and Aleksandr turned over the idea of asking about the reasoning behind that), "so we don't put the signal too close."

That was a reminder, the way the occasional faint sounds that carried from the nearest encirclement were a smaller reminder. For a little while he didn't want to eat. Not when he thought of gaunt faces turned up to the sky. But not eating wouldn't somehow feed _them_, only leave more for the Finns, and maybe it was something that _someone_ like the intended recipients would have it. He wasn't sure how much of this decision was swayed by not wanting to stop eating, but he had his self-suspicions.

* * *

Elias continued the lessons, whatever he could think of. These nights he only called on Jokela when absolute privacy was necessary; otherwise, the dugout or the front room served, voices low in case some of the others understood more Russian than they let on. The sauna might have served as well, but the thought of the last time they'd shared it made him reluctant to suggest it again, because even if he meant nothing by it he still wasn't sure how Aleksandr would hear it. He drilled Aleksandr on the Litany, had him keep practice shifting, took him on several more jaunts into the Penumbra. Garou glyphs, on the side, and acquainting him with the simple language of wolves that Garou understood by instinct. A review of the thirteen tribes - he didn't go very far into the Silver Fangs because the Silver Fangs themselves could do it better. So more about the Get of Fenris, then the Children of Gaia, the Shadow Lords, the Glass Walkers, the Bone Gnawers -

"Ha," he said. "The Bone Gnawers. Well."

This time Aleksandr went so far as to prompt. "What about them?"

"Twenty-five years ago I'd tell you that the thing about the Bone Gnawers is they're all as poor as mud. If there's a crack, they'll fall through it. They live in the countryside and the city, and they're lucky if they can keep hold of a shack. Mostly, it's the gutter, in places that have a gutter. But at least all that time in the gutter means they've got a tendency to be tough. They're good at keeping alive, at least."

"Twenty-five years ago?"

"Right. Or, let's see, twenty-three, to cut it close. I'm sure you've learned in school -" Aleksandr looked like he grasped what Elias was getting at. "- about how you had the Bolsheviks and so on. Well, as far as I know, it seems it took the fancy of a lot of the Russian Bone Gnawers." A lot of the Finnish ones, too... he thought inevitably of Toivo, and winced. "They thought it was a good chance at clawing their way out of the gutter. I don't suppose you have any idea how well that's working out for them."

"I don't."

"Ah well. And out here, some are still trying. I know a Ragabash - Toivo Jarvinen - who managed to get an apartment in Tampere, and has a job that pays the rent. That's his way of showing his Ragabash contrariness, he says - being settled in a proper home with Tyyne and Anja. That's his wife and little girl, by the way. But then he's concentrated so hard on getting himself settled, and on keeping himself settled, that he's not paying as much attention as he might to Garou matters. He's a fostern, and he looks like he'll be one for a long while even as Bone Gnawers go. I've asked him if it's really worth the effort, and he's told me to do charach with myself. Charach," he explained, "is the term for when Garou mates with Garou. But he's decent when you get him to take a look outside his door. And he does some great drawings when he has the money for it."

As he was taking the pictures from his sleeve and spreading them out by way of edification, he saw that has-questions-but-forget-about-hearing-them look. Elias had not, as of yet, hit on a reliable method to induce him to forget about forgetting about it.

He kept trying. "You look like you have something to say about it."

This time he got lucky and Aleksandr said more than a token little thing about it. "I was wondering. Is he...?"

"Yes?" Elias said after a few seconds of trying to figure out whether that would prompt him or cut him off this time.

"You said he's trying to have a life like the ones at home tried. Is he also a... is he...?"

Well, it wasn't as if Elias had tried particularly hard to hide it. Maybe some part of him had put it out there for Aleksandr to piece it together. "I think he votes Social Democrat, actually. Not _all_ the way..." He flapped his left hand. "... but in the general direction, yes."

"Oh." And he still had that look, but Elias had no more luck getting more out of him.

* * *

Aleksandr reached, and reached, and one night he had a catch larger than usual. He dreamed of someone he was fairly sure was the woman on the horse he'd been reaching for. This time someone else said a name, and she turned toward it. This startled him so much that the whole thing nearly broke apart before he could get hold of the name.

When he woke up he scrambled after that dream, dragged it back up, kept his eyes closed as he mouthed it over and over, anchoring in reality.

* * *

Then the Silent Striders, the Black Furies, the Fianna, the Stargazers, the Red Talons, the Uktena and Wendigo. Finally, the Black Spiral Dancers - "They don't show their faces around here often, but when they do we kick them in straightaway."

After that he started on a brief history of the Garou - Aleksandr's eyes got big and he got that look again when they reached the period of the Impergium, and this time he kept his mouth well shut. Elias wondered for a bit if he should've saved that particular era for later, but that was getting ridiculous - the cub would have to find out eventually. And he was pretty sure his eyes had popped, too, when he'd first heard about it, and he remembered Marita's exclamations from beside him, so he repeated what Jalmari and Answers-Storm had told them about how they _had _put a stop to the Impergium in the end, and for damn good reason. He had no idea what good it did in this case.

This happened all over again when they got to the War of Rage - Aleksandr's big eyes, Elias's don't-worry-never-again-and-hey-there's-still-the-Corax - but at least there didn't seem to be quite the same visceral horror. Aleksandr knew humans; he'd never have known a Gurahl.

And night after night he went sniping at the motti, went raiding with the others, dreamed of switching to kicking in Black Spiral Dancers' ugly mugs.

And one of those nights, he heard someone else's howls. Still at considerable distance - better too far, they'd figure, than too close. He howled back. _Here, we're here_.

After he got back, he told this to Aleksandr. "We'll be expecting them soon."

He wasn't sure it was a very accurate comparison, but the color of Aleksandr's face put him in mind of spoiled milk. Maybe he was only interpreting it around its expression. "Oh."

They don't bite, he almost said, but that wasn't, strictly speaking, true. He settled for, "I don't think they'll bite you."

"How should I... behave?"

"Well, you're a cub, and a lost one at that, so they won't expect you to have the protocol memorized. Just remember your rhyas and follow my lead." His color didn't much improve. "Are you worried about anything specific?"

He was about to write it off as another forget-about-asking when Aleksandr said, in a rush (when he spoke beyond the simplest sentences it seemed always headlong rushing or constant hesitation or both), "I know you said I'm one of them, I know, but I don't know _about _them, how they do things, if I'll say something like... Leningrad, and they'll be... be..."

Elias waited to be sure he wouldn't finish the sentence, then cogitated further while he was at it. "They _know _how things are in Russia now," he said once done cogitating, "and vaunted alphas that they are they'd be idiots not to take that into account. But, much as I'd still like you to understand I won't take you out and shoot you for _saying _something I don't like, I expect you can't go so wrong just with how you are. It's not as though you normally go about raving about, what's it called, Soviet power and so on, do you? You'll be all right. All right?"

"All right," Aleksandr lied blatantly, but besides what reassurances he could think of Elias couldn't do anything about it, as per usual.

Instead he kept on teaching Aleksandr the glyphs, drawing on scraps of paper he'd feed into the fire afterward. The forms, the auspices. The Silver Fangs' pawful of claws or set of sharp teeth, the Get of Fenris's wolf-born-of-wolf. Aleksandr particularly stared at that one. "We had it first," Elias told him.

He took a little time to go back into the Penumbra and replace the crude flag he'd planted at the house. This time the branch was one he sawed off one of the spirit-shadows of trees on this side, with all due respects paid to the spirits involved. This one was larger, more visible from a distance - though admittedly, with all the trees around this didn't do much.

The next night they were closer. Not quite the formal Howl of Introduction, but establishing: _We're here. Where are you? And we are - _two homid Galliards of the Silver Fangs, he gathered from their intonations. Not, then, the one he'd addressed the talen to - Kirill Belyev, who was a Theurge.

That night, coming back from his patrol, Elias gave notice to Kustaa before taking lupus and howling back. Then it was back and forth, Kustaa skiing along behind him, until he met the two silvery wolves between the trees.

One after another, they slipped back into homid. The Silver Fangs turned out to be a man and woman - tall, sturdy, and with that same look gleaming in the moonlight, the moonlight which also gleamed on metal at hands and throat. A dedicated bag hung over the woman's shoulder. Elias thought himself back into formalities and greeted them with all the due ceremony to be had. In turn, they introduced themselves in full form: Filipp Gennadyevich Zvezdin and Svetlana Konstantinovna Volkovskaya.

"Where is the cub?" asked Volkovskaya.

"He awaits you at camp. If you would prefer, I can direct you through the Penumbra."

They very much preferred this and so, throwing in a few apologies all around, Elias shucked his skis and rifle (you'd have to be a Glass Walker and hence default urrahnot to be chewed out for dedicating a Weaver-thing like that), lent them his mirror to step sideways, and showed them to his marker. He'd been through the forest enough times in the past weeks that even in the Penumbra finding his way back wasn't too difficult.

"We would like to know," said Zvezdin, "the circumstances in which you discovered this cub."

He retold the story as they walked: the howling, the Warder's discovery, the mutual lack of comprehension, the dispatch to the camp. Volkovskaya said the same thing he'd thought: "It would have made matters simpler if Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm had notified us while the cub was at the sept."

"I am afraid he did not see fit to inform me of his reasoning. However, he did grant me leave to use my own discretion in this matter, so once I had determined that he was a cub, I believed I should contact his tribemates."

"I see. How old is he?"

"Nineteen."

"Fairly old for the First Change," said Zvezdin, "but not impossible. I understand that Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm may have wished to verify his status, but in matters pertaining to our tribe he should have left this to us to determine. No Kin-Fetch attended him?"

"None that we saw, and we found no baptismal mark."

"Hm. He was with the Red Army, you said?"

"Yes, he was a conscript."

"Hm."

"You said in your message," said Volkovskaya, "that you believed an ancestor of his had visited the sept?"

"Yes. I believe a dream of his ancestor helped lead him there." And he recounted Aleksandr's dream of the rider in the forest. Volkovskaya made noises of vague affirmation.

The brief journey passed even faster with questions of this kind. Once at the marker, he peered through the Gauntlet to be sure no mischievous spirit had relocated it. Then he left them, with a few more apologies (couldn't go wrong with those) and found his way back to Kustaa, who'd kicked himself out of his skis and now paced impatient circles in the snow. There, he apologized again and slipped back into his gear, and they set off for camp together.

Aleksandr, awake when they entered the dugout, was promptly on his feet, leaving the hat behind atop the book of Tolstoy. A hurried stroll to the house followed, Elias wondering if, with his spoiled-milk complexion, Aleksandr might even be in so bad a way as to spew his dinner on the pair. The image was funny, but for Aleksandr's sake he hoped it wouldn't come to that.

"We'll meet them in the Penumbra," said Elias as he latched the door. "That way if anyone's eavesdropping they won't hear two extra people." He turned and got out the mirror again. "I'll keep watch through the Gauntlet to be sure nothing's going on back here, and to know if we have to step back through. I'll come up now and again, in case you need me to say something, but I've already told them about everything that only _I _could tell them. Will you be all right on your own?" The next second he realized it was a stupid question. If he thought he wouldn't be all right, and odds were this was what he was thinking, there wasn't much Elias could do about it.

Whatever he thought, though, what Aleksandr said, back stiff, was "Yes."

Elias turned and thanked Jokela, who looked up from his hasty setup and nodded at them. They'd worked out signals - sound might not get through intact, but if, say, he stood his Russian dictionary in a certain position on the desk, that meant they had to get back through immediately before someone had to be let in to see they'd vanished. Also, he saw, Jokela had the forethought to lay out a half-finished game of cards for them to snatch up - the kind of game where speaking wasn't necessary. To be certain, Elias spent another two minutes teaching Aleksandr the basics in case they were called upon to continue play. Then, after a last look around, Elias held out the mirror.

On the other side, Luna's hazy light came through clearest in the piece of Penumbra containing shadows of neither house nor trees. In his absence the Silver Fangs had lit a lantern, which Volkovskaya had set down before her as she consulted some massive leather-bound tome; hence, he had an even better view of them. He pegged Zvezdin as having maybe a decade on Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm; Volkovskaya, meanwhile, he guessed at around her thirties.

More introductions, with all the pomp Elias could call up without feeling like a complete windbag. When he gave Volkovskaya's name, it was sheer happenstance that Aleksandr's soft gasp fit in the space between words. Volkovskaya raised an eyebrow but nodded to Elias to continue.

And he continued, up to - "Honored elders, I present Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov, a cub of your blood. Now, if you will pray excuse me?"

"Yes, go on," said Zvezdin. "Now, child, let us have a closer look at you."

The way Aleksandr stumbled toward them, one would think his ankle was still twisted. Elias withdrew, staying close enough to keep a view of the room on the other side of the Gauntlet; as he tried to concentrate on that view, he heard Volkovskaya say, "You have heard the name?"

Aleksandr replied, "Yes."

"Where was this?"

"I've heard it before, I think, but the last time I heard it was in a dream. Princess Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Volkovskaya?"

* * *

The Volkovskaya in front of him looked briefly and pleasantly surprised, and nodded. "Yes. That sounds correct. When did you have such a dream?"

"A few nights ago." More had come after.

"Hunts-With-Mielikki tells me that earlier you dreamed of a woman paying a visit to the Finnish Garou. Was this the same woman?"

"I think so. I also heard Kanyukova."

"And Hunts-With-Mielikki did not mention the name to you prior?"

"No."

"You never heard this specific name before?"

"I don't remember hearing it before."

"That very nearly confirms it. After his account of this potential vision, we examined our tribal records for possible candidates." Pages rustled as she consulted her book. "Princess Volkovskaya is my ancestor, and her Garou name was Yelizaveta Kanyukova - this was also her human name before she married Prince Volkovsky. She paid a visit to the Sept of Silent Birds in the year 1810, to mark the transition of the protectorate from House Gleaming Eye to Clan Crescent Moon. It is highly likely that you share blood with her, and therefore with me. Now, cousin, if you would allow me..."

She put the book under her arm, picked up the lantern, and took a few steps closer. Aleksandr kept still as she scrutinized him, holding the lantern close - "Chin up, if you would" - and turned to the old man, Zvezdin. "He has the Volkovsky look, does he not?"

Now it was Zvezdin's turn to step closer while Volkovskaya went to the side and gave him the lantern. Aleksandr tried even harder not to look away, not to squirm. He imagined suddenly that this, too, might be a bad dream or worse; he uprooted these ideas as fast as he could, because if all this had been delusion there was no help for him. Behind Zvezdin he could just see Laukkanen, facing away, stock-still, and tried not to make it too obvious that he kept looking at that because, as with Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm, it was especially hard to look back into Zvezdin's eyes for too long.

At last Zvezdin stepped back, proclaiming as he returned the lantern, "There _is _a resemblance, especially in the face. As a matter of fact, Svetlana Konstantinovna, I would say that his look is particularly reminiscent of your father, though the personality is evidently quite different."

Aleksandr thought, in unspoken reply, of his mother. It was a bit embarrassing to say a boy got his face from his mother, but for the most part that had been the case for him as well as for his brothers. They shared much of the same bone structure, and the same eyes. Their hair was their father's, and Aleksandr and Mikhail had also inherited his lanky body, though their height came from both parents.

He put it together, chain links: If he looked like this Konstantin Volkovsky and he also looked like his mother, then his mother -

- and there _had _been the denunciation, no matter what hadn't come of it -

- but that was, that was...

"But Father stayed behind alone. Not even Mother remained with him. Do you think perhaps he...?"

"I had the acquaintance of Konstantin Anatolyevich from boyhood, and that does not seem at all unlikely."

None of the relatives Aleksandr knew of had that name and patronymic; then again, he didn't know of many. His father was Sergey Mikhailovich, and his grandfathers had been Mikhail Trofimovich Novikov and Aleksandr Kuzmich Smirnov. This didn't reassure him much, not when he knew that a former would have definite motive to lie about it, and motive not to pass on the secret when the walls were so thin.

And not when he knew what Laukkanen had said, those nights ago, though he still couldn't imagine his mother or grandmother doing anything of the kind.

Zvezdin had turned to him again. "Now then, cub, can you assume lupus form?"

He could, and once he did so there followed another two rounds of scrutiny with the lantern, punctuated by further instructions to lift his head and so on. Zvezdin murmured various things he didn't quite comprehend; Volkovskaya listened to Zvezdin and murmured acknowledgment and occasional reply.

For example, "Hm. Quite extensive streaking. Unusual given his ancestry. For all his wild ways, your father _was _extremely well-bred."

"Perhaps his mate was not quite as well-bred?"

"Likely so."

Aleksandr wondered if the blood going to his face might show through the wolf's fur.

Eventually this, too, ended. "I would like to ask you some questions," Zvezdin told him.

Aleksandr understood - he dropped lupus and fell into his normal shape in that easy way, much easier than working the opposite direction. He stood and pushed himself into meeting Zvezdin's eye.

Zvezdin began, "Might you have heard the name Volkovsky mentioned among your family?"

"Once, that I remember." He picked it up outside his family, too, in passing - one of the prominent families before the Revolution. "My mother's family used to live in Zimovo, and my grandmother said they came riding by a lot."

"Zimovo village?"

"Yes."

"What was your grandmother's name? The one she used, at any rate."

"Praskovya Gerasimovna Smirnova - when she was married. Kharitonova, before that."

"Your grandfather?"

Aleksandr gradually recounted both sets of grandparents; Volkovskaya consulted her book and Zvezdin frowned. "None of those names match those of any of our Kinfolk families. Are you absolutely certain that they are not assumed?"

"No, but if they are I don't know about it."

"Now, on your father's side - what were your grandparents' occupations?"

The answer came quite easily, as thing to be ideologically proud of tended to. "My grandfather worked in a factory and my grandmother worked in a bakery."

"Did they?"

"That's what my father said."

"And what were they on your mother's side?"

"Peasants." When they looked like they didn't think they heard it right he repeated, quickly, "They were peasants." And there was nothing wrong with that. It wasn't as if they'd been _rich _peasants, kulaks, as if they'd ever lived at the expense of anyone else, which was more than could be said for the Volkovskys and almost certainly the Zvezdins. He had no reason to be ashamed. But Zvezdin and Volkovskaya, staring at him, made him feel as though he should be.

Volkovskaya said, very slowly and gently, "Cousin, please understand that you are among allies now. We are aware that our tribemates still in Russia are ill-treated and dispossessed by the humans in power, and they have good reason to keep silent as to their proper status for much the same reason as the Veil must be upheld. But there is no need to conceal anything of the kind from us."

He looked at her; she looked back. He looked at Laukkanen, still standing there. Laukkanen had told him that if you looked back to the other side like that you couldn't pay attention to the side you were on, that the only thing that could snap you out of it was pain, was wounds.

He looked back to her and said, about as slowly, "Once someone said my mother was -" He bit his tongue on "former," imagined it would grate on their ears like "Leningrad." "- was a noble, in disguise. They looked into her background. But they didn't find anything that wasn't as she said it was, and I think if there was anything..."

"Ah," said Volkovskaya. "Obviously, there is _something_."

Now there was no fur to cover his embarrassment. "I know. I'm sorry."

But still, they were so thorough. Especially then; it hadn't been long after Kirov's murder and everyone was on the lookout.

"Your face doesn't lie, cousin, and there must have been a reason for someone to say such a thing. Perhaps your past was so well-concealed as to escape their knowledge, but your look _was _the reason - perhaps some disgruntled Red Bone Gnawer recognized her for what she was, even if it was unable to convince its human accomplices. Do you resemble your mother, do you think?"

"Yes, besides, um..."

Zvezdin's frown was very deep now. "I am afraid I am not as optimistic as you, Svetlana Konstantinovna."

"How do you mean, Filipp Gennadyevich-rhya?"

"Consider all the circumstances. Consider that he does not bear the mark of the Baptism of Fire, and that the Volkovsky Kin-Fetch did not visit the Sept of Silent Birds. Consider that he knew nothing of his heritage - consider that he himself admits he has no inkling of nobility in his ancestry. Consider that though he may share blood with Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Kanyukova, and with the ancient line of the Volkovskys, the manifestation of this is unduly marred in comparison to your own or your father's - it is an imprecise science, to be sure, but I highly doubt that a mate from within the tribe could have brought his breeding so low in one generation. Consider, finally, the habits of your father, by far the most viable candidate. Consider his profligate ways before the rise of Bolshevism, and the likelihood that at some point this profligacy produced at least one bastard."

In the normal course of things, Aleksandr was quite used to people talking in front of him but not to him. It wasn't as though he particularly minded that in itself; it would be silly to mind, given that he avoided attention best as he could. But here, listening to Zvezdin talk about breeding - here, now, he was angry. He wanted to shout, howl, mark his existence.

He'd wanted to shout before, or just to speak when it came to some things. And as he had before, he kept his mouth closed.

Now they whispered together. He couldn't hear them, and didn't try very hard to.

Laukkanen turned around.

* * *

Elias took them in - the Galliards having a private conference, and behind them Aleksandr standing with clenched hands and lips pressed together tight - and wondered what he'd missed; his eavesdropping tendencies, discontented, wanted to have their fill now, but he shoved them down. "Pray excuse me. I hope matters are proceeding well?" he said, for courtesy's sake, though Aleksandr at least didn't seem to think so.

Zvezdin turned toward him. "They proceed fairly well. We would speak with you in a short while."

Elias decided this meant he shouldn't look through again. So he stood and watched as they finished up their whispering and turned toward him again.

"Elias Hunts-With-Mielikki," began Zvezdin, "we thank you for bringing our attention to this matter. However, at this time it is our judgment that while the cub is clearly of Silver Fang stock, it is far less likely that he is suitable for the tribe proper."

"Ah. That is... unfortunate." Elias wondered briefly and wildly if in his nervousness Aleksandr _had _started raving about Soviet power.

"The circumstantial evidence suggests he is some natural descendant of the Volkovskys, born of the Ragabash Prince Konstantin Volkovsky's mingling with commoners. Even if he were of impeccable lineage, which I must doubt given his own testimony, there is the indisputable and troubling fact that he has grown to this age taught nothing of his heritage and responsibilities. An improper upbringing leads to an improper attitude toward the responsibilities of rule." His tone softened slightly. "We do not fault you for notifying us. We cannot expect those of other tribes to discern such subtleties."

* * *

After the formal leave-takings, Aleksandr and Laukkanen stepped back into the house. Jokela nodded at them from the table and thanked Aleksandr when he cleared up the game of cards. They left immediately after.

"Well," Laukkanen whispered to him halfway to the dugout, "I hope I didn't get your hopes too high."

"Oh no, you didn't," Aleksandr whispered back. He hadn't had any hopes of that kind to be dashed; what he felt, instead, was an incredible relief. It couldn't have been true, and it _wasn't _true. He couldn't possibly be a leader, and he wasn't one.

Then again, rage continued to simmer at the back of his head. He was relieved, yes, that the Silver Fangs weren't going to haul him into all of that, but in the opposite direction he was still indignant that they had rejected him. Rejected him like _that_. If it had only been a matter of _him _being unsuitable, he would've had no problem because it would be true, but it wasn't just him, it was his whole family they'd brushed off - even Mikhail, the natural leader - and in a larger way all the people of their class. All that about commoners and lineage and bastards. They hadn't sneered about it, but they were pitying, condescending, and in a way that was worse. With sneering he could fortify himself with a pure fury at them even if he never showed it, assure himself with vigor that this was the enemy he'd already learned about, tell himself not to be taken in.

And then again, Zvezdin had said _clearly of Silver Fang stock_, and that meant that still, at _some _point, _something _was...

His mother, no, it would be his grandmother...

Volkovskaya had still called him cousin, with that pitying look on her face.

Laukkanen went on as if he'd said yes. "It's not so bad, not being a Silver Fang. Take me, for instance - _I'm _no Silver Fang. Though then again," he continued, contemplatively, "I'm not sure you're exactly Fenrir material. Though that's not so bad either. A lot of Garou, actually, aren't Fenrir material."

And Laukkanen had been the one to tell him about the Bone Gnawers who lived in the gutter under the press of capitalism, then talk about one who'd escaped it with an air of disapproval, damning with faint praise. He seemed to think "Garou matters," being another soldier in some endless war of spirits, ought to be altogether more important than this Jarvinen feeding his daughter.

After all, he _was _a White. He might not be constantly shoving it into Aleksandr's face, might not be torturing him like Malinovsky had said the Whites would (but Aleksandr was also Garou, and for a while Laukkanen had thought he was some secret prince of Garou atop that; would he have looked after an ordinary human in nearly the same way?), but it was still there, like the encirclements - he couldn't see them from camp but he could hear sometimes, and imagine them.

"I mean, if all Garou had to be Fenrir or nothing, there'd be a whole lot less Garou in the world today, and we have enough trouble keeping our numbers up as it is..."

They ducked into the dugout. He whispered, "Laukkanen?"

"Yes?"

"Could I ask...?"

"Of course!"

"What tribe do you think I'll be in, then?"

"Well, let's see... I'd have a better idea if you spoke up more often, but..."

"I'm sorry."

"There's no need for that." They shucked off their boots and leaned side-by-side against the wall in the dark, at a short distance from the huddle of sleeping bodies, blankets pulled up to their necks, heads turned toward one another. Laukkanen considered. "Right now, just roughly mind you, I'd say the Children of Gaia."

He remembered what Laukkanen had said about them, when teaching him about the tribes. _Some might say they're too soft, but I figure they didn't get to thriving up here shoulder-to-shoulder with _us_ by being nothing but soft. You definitely don't flop your way through a klaive duel with a Koskinen. It comes from how they try to smooth things out with everyone, get us all working together against the Wyrm, and to get hold of _all _of us they're easier on the weakest of us. Sometimes they're too easy, but that's sometimes._

Laukkanen said now, "I suppose part of it's actually how quiet you are. I guess some of that you chalk up to, you know, the situation, but _are _you, usually?"

"Yes, usually." _Always_, he was tempted to say.

"Yes, well, not all Children of Gaia are quiet, definitely not all of them, but a lot of them are..." He gestured, abbreviated and vague. "... accommodating, like that." By which he meant pliant, by which he meant weak? "Of course we're all fighters, but some of us keep up the fight dawn to dusk to dawn and some of us don't. Though I figure, just because you'd rather not, let's say, smash liquor bottles over people's heads every night doesn't mean you can't be brave where it really matters, against the Wyrm. Look at the captain - he's Kinfolk, but it still holds for him. And as far as being brave..."

Laukkanen said nothing else for such a long time that Aleksandr thought that maybe he was meant to finish the sentence for himself, that it was self-evident (to Laukkanen). He looked away. The closest of the sleeping men muttered something and rolled onto his stomach, his arm flung out over Aleksandr's feet.

"As far as being brave," Laukkanen repeated at last, "there's different varieties of bravery. Some you can see easier than others. Do you remember when you turned around, fought back, and nearly wounded me with my own puukko?"

After another pause to see if it was rhetorical, "Yes."

"Now that was brave of you. That would be one variety, one of the easier ones. But do you remember when... the time in the sauna?"

He swallowed. "Yes."

"I suppose a lot of people wouldn't call it brave, and it's not exactly glorious battle, but I think, yes, what you did in there... I mean to say, I think you were brave to say what you did."

Aleksandr turned his head to face him again.

"I mean to say, when you thought you were going to die and you thought I would... when you said those things about how you would... when you told me how you would cooperate, and how for this you asked me not to spare your life but to spare your family trouble from it." Laukkanen's Russian had slipped into the cadence of the first two days. "In my opinion, it was brave of you there, as well, to willingly give up something of that sort."

Brave? If he'd thought that using his mouth on Laukkanen in the French way would have saved his life, he probably would have done it to save his life, and surely Laukkanen wouldn't call _that _brave. But as it was, as it had seemed, why ask for something so obviously out of reach? And even the kind of bravery Laukkanen thought was easy to pick out - if surviving was next to impossible, a quick death fighting was better than a slow one under the hands of torturers. He thought all this rather distantly - he was at a remove from his sick fear and resignation on that night, and was fairly certain now that it wouldn't happen, not that way.

"I have given this some consideration, and if I were in such a situation as you feared you were in, I am not at all certain that I could do such a thing. But that is how _I _am. Generally speaking, my tribe swears by one sort of bravery. A number of my tribemates would disagree when I call you brave for such a thing - though those tribemates are not here and I am, so you may disregard their opinion. But when I think of that sort of bravery - that quiet sort - I associate it with the Children of Gaia. I can far more easily imagine one of them doing such a thing, though admittedly this is perhaps because I am not as well acquainted with them as with my fellow Fenrir. Yes. In my opinion, I believe you would do well with them."

"Oh," he said, to say something. Then he thought of something proper to say. "Thank you."

"You are welcome."

The next silence went on so long that by the end of it, Aleksandr had slid onto the floor of the dugout, wrapped in the blanket. He'd carefully moved the sleeping man's outstretched hand out of the way, and now he looked at its shape - this close, in the dark, it didn't look like a hand anymore. Laukkanen had joined him, and that seemed to be the end of it for the night, but then Laukkanen whispered again, behind him, "I have also been curious about a related matter."

Aleksandr rolled back over, narrowly avoiding both Laukkanen and the hand. "Yes?"

"How did you come to believe that you would die? No. How did you come to believe that we would kill you?"

How, Aleksandr asked himself on the heels of that, blinking at what he could make out of Laukkanen's face, was he supposed to reply?

It was his own turn to cogitate. He, too, stretched it out, mostly with mental circlings, until Laukkanen said, very gently, "There is no need to answer if you do not wish to."

"No," said Aleksandr. "I mean. I can answer." Could there be any harm in telling him this? Some strategic value he was overlooking? Would Laukkanen take offense at hearing exactly what he'd asked for?

"I heard... I heard the Whites tortured people. That you... that they'd been doing it to their prisoners all the way back in the time of the revolution. In the fighting between the Whites and the Reds. "

"The revolution...?" Laukkanen exhaled, a long lingering sigh. "Ah. The civil war. I see. Who told you?"

"Different places. I don't remember every one exactly. Some of it was in the newspaper. The radio. Komsomol meetings. People talked about it. Politruk Malinovsky talked about it."

"Go on."

"And you... and they were leaving bodies, outside of camp. Other people found them and said there were... were pieces, missing."

This exhalation came out half a whistle. Astonished, maybe, incredulous. "Maybe the wolves were at them. Regular wolves. _We _don't eat humans, but our Kin don't always pay attention to that."

"I don't know. I didn't see. But everyone was talking about them. They said -"

_Some of them, pants at their ankles and cocks chopped _-

"- they said, some of the men were... they had their... they were... they'd been undressed. Castrated." And could regular wolves undo buttons and pull down drawers, he didn't need to say.

Another whistling exhalation.

"And... I didn't hear so much about it, but I did hear..."

And was this going out of bounds? What made you think we'd kill you, Laukkanen had asked. Not, what made you think we'd fuck you.

Before Laukkanen could prompt him again, he felt his shoulders square best as they could lying on his side. It was with an odd, quasi-accusatory defiance that he opened his mouth again and said, "I heard that under the fascists they have a lot of homosexuals."

Though Gorky had written that in 1934, and five years later it would all be different with Germany and the fascist Hitlerites with their swastikas. He remembered, not long at all before it all became different with Germany, going to the cinema to see Eisenstein's newest. He'd sat between Mikhail and Yulia in a packed house, watching Teutonic Knights falling through the ice. Mikhail hadn't been sure which film he'd liked better, Eisenstein's or _Volga-Volga_. Mikhail loved things he could shout laughter at, but he also adored the grand pageantry, the momentum of the music, the old battles on horseback with swords (and did _that_, too, have some further meaning?).

A few weeks later the film was nowhere to be found, and he knew better than to try very hard to find it. Around this time Mikhail had decided he preferred _Volga-Volga_. Aleksandr found it hard to think that Mikhail had decided only because of that, but he found it somewhat easier to think that after all, it was hard to find fault with what they said was Comrade Stalin's favorite.

He didn't pretend to understand how it all had come about. More outspoken people asked how it came about at Komsomol meetings, sometimes. Their elders never seemed quite sure how to answer, even as they answered.

"I don't know about that," said Laukkanen after another while, in a too-solemn voice, giving the impression that any moment the solemnity would detonate in a burst of more of his laughter. "It's not as though we can get them to all come out and be totted up. They'd think it's a cunning plan to get them all arrested. I know I'dthink that. And from what I hear about Germany, if anything they had more homosexuals going about _before _the lot they have now came in. There was still a law like there is here, but in places like Berlin they didn't much care about it anymore. That's what my tribemates from around there have told me. As far as around here, I haven't noticed nearly as much in the way of fascists, and there's still that law about... but Toivo _did _tell me a silly story about Marshal Mannerheim. You know Mannerheim, right?"

"A little bit." He wondered how many of the same things they knew.

"Well, Toivo told me quite a few silly stories about Mannerheim, actually, but in this one he'd brought a boy from the Urals, you know, back in the time of the tsars, to do his fetching and carrying. And the story goes that he was having sex with this boy. I'm not much in need or want of someone to fetch and carry, but I figure that if it's good enough for Mannerheim it's good enough for me."

"Did he know?"

"He? Know what?"

"Jarvinen. Did he know that you..."

Now Laukkanen did laugh, and even - while still lying down - threw his head back along the floor. "He certainly knew _after_ that!"

"Oh."

"And he was pretty embarrassed about it. He was trying to poke fun at Mannerheim, not at me."

"Oh."

* * *

Elias thought, turning the pieces around waiting for them to click in place. So he'd heard they tortured people, he'd heard they were chock full of homosexuals (and maybe surreptitiously they were, for all Elias knew, maybe there were far more than the few he'd bumped against fumbling in the dark, it wasn't as if homosexuals ran around shouting it to the skies, and maybe a lot of them were like him and liked women well enough). Rape was one of those shitty Wyrm-soaked things people often did in wars, and since it involved fucking maybe Aleksandr figured a homosexual would be more likely to think of doing it to another man.

It seemed on a general level nobody liked the prospect of a man fucking around with other men, but they did like pointing at each other about it.

So it _wasn't _all Elias giving him that idea. A good chunk of it was probably still him, to be sure, the dedication and so on, but not all of it. And he guessed it was the truth, not only because he wanted to believe it but because it had for once been volunteered. That was a small relief.

The talk of the mutilated bodies, though. The troops who'd done in that particular motti had been rushed to the Isthmus, no time to celebrate; it would be a while if ever before he could ask after that. _His _company hadn't done anything _quite_ like that, just dragged over and propped up a couple of the frozen-solid ones they'd found in the woods (not to mention the sentries with the cut throats, left where they'd not-fallen, the cold was that deep this winter), but maybe some other lot got more creative.

It was a good thing for them, though they'd never know it, that no one had ever crept up and cut Aleksandr's throat in the night.

Someone _had _shot him, but at least that was at a distance, which gave them time to ski away; Crinos wasn't quite optimal for moving in these snows. If Aleksandr had managed to catch the sniper while in frenzy, he probably would've taken note of the corpse when he came to. And if he'd been reluctant to mention he'd killed a Finn, the Warder - Ritva - still would have noticed. As far as the sniper himself, Delirium should have taken care of it.

Aleksandr said nothing else. Eventually, his breathing steadied. Elias lay close, maybe too close, and fell into the rhythm and fell into sleep after him.

* * *

Aleksandr woke with his face pressed into the blanket, damp around the eyes. He blinked and squeezed his eyes back shut, a few more stray tears slipping out, reaching after the dream he'd just had.

The encirclement again, he thought it had been. Malinovsky, Golubev, the usual. But then there was Mikhail, though Mikhail hadn't been in his division, and Fyodor and Yulia, though Fyodor and Yulia were too young to be in the army at all and Yulia was a girl besides. Them and his mother and father and aunt and all four of his grandparents, and, and, and... He couldn't remember what had happened to them all in his fast-dissolving dream - his nightmare. That was probably for the best.

But Princess Yelizaveta Volkovskaya had presided over everything. He was certain it was her, though when looking through her eyes in other dreams he hadn't seen her face before. Garou symbols raced over her clothes in silver thread. Above her fur collar she was death-pale, moon-pale, her hair an almost equally pale blond in which silver and diamond and amber gleamed. The planes of her impassive face reminded him, logically enough, of Svetlana Volkovskaya. Her eyes were also a familiar blue - his eyes, Mikhail and Fyodor's eyes, his mother's eyes, but not his grandmother's eyes and not, so he'd heard, his grandfather's eyes.

And had this part of the dream, too, been some real echo, like the one of Princess Volkovskaya in Finland?

He couldn't remember what she'd been doing in the dream but the inchoate idea still had his face pressed into the blanket, his shoulders twitching.

"Santeri?"

He twisted, looked up. Someone crouched over him and repeated, in a hoarse whisper, "Santeri?"

Aleksandr nodded. The man over him whispered something else in Finnish, which he didn't quite grasp, and climbed his way over and out of the dugout. As Aleksandr watched him go out into the dark, reluctant to try to sleep again, Laukkanen whispered, "Aleksandr Sergeyevich? Are you all right?"

Out of some blend of fatigue and that odd defiance of last night, he didn't want to lie right now. How could he really say no, though, when he was still in one piece? So Aleksandr said nothing.

"What did the Silver Fangs say to you?"

His voice came out too flat. "Not much I didn't expect."

"Oh. You see, they had to run for it out of Russia, so they're especially bitter about Bolshevism and all of that. And it's fine, really, not being one, didn't I say, a lot of us aren't -"

This repetition tripped some mechanism of his tongue he hadn't known existed. "I wouldn't want to be one even if they'd wanted me."

Would he have said differently if it turned out they _had _wanted him? No - not in its essence, though probably he wouldn't have said it aloud. He would've gone along, constantly hoping to get away and go home. And maybe if he got home there he might find other Garou, ones who didn't talk that way, _think _that way; he might find a sort of pack he could blend into.

Even now, would they let him go home when the war was over?

The war _had _to be over, some day. They'd said at first it would be finished in time to be Stalin's birthday present. Stalin's birthday had come and gone, but still, eventually, with sheer numbers if nothing else... surely Finland couldn't _win_.

He knew better than to say this to Laukkanen.

Maybe he'd already said too much because now there was a tautness in Laukkanen's voice, an excessive patience slathered atop it, when he said, "Listen. I know being brought up by humans you learn certain things. I know being brought up in Russia now you learn more things. But what you have to understand now is that a lot of those things you learned are _wrong_." 


	6. Heroics

** Chapter Six: Heroics**

_ Karelian Isthmus, Finland, February 1940_

A silver medal on a red ribbon, "For Courage," pinned to his coat, bumping his Komsomol badge to second in line. His name in the lists in the newspapers, and an entry in the Combat Pages pamphlets. Accolades from Politruk Tarasov, who naturally expected him to get out there and do it all over again. A new bicycle that they'd deliver home, for when he came home; in the meantime there was a certificate to prove it. "If I die," Mikhail almost wrote home after he was done with the requisite thank-you-I'm-not-worthy, "Sasha can have it. If he dies too, then Fedya and Yulia can share." He scratched this out. If he died his folks were smart enough to work out distribution on their own. "If it gets there before we do, go ahead and use it while we're away," he wrote instead, after jostling himself into a more optimistic frame of mind. Not so optimistic, though, that he didn't stop himself from promising "We'll be finished by May Day," encouraged by a flight of fancy that this sentence alone might keep them in Finland until Stalin's birthday came around again. He settled for a more nebulous "We'll be finished soon. All my love, Misha."

Strictly speaking, this wasn't true. He was holding some back for Aleksandr, wherever he was now. Everything was such a mess, especially in the first months of the war, that for all he knew his twin was already buried under the snow of some other battlefield, or even this battlefield. For all he knew he might run into him in the latest batch sent to this front, or have already passed him by obliviously. For all he knew Aleksandr was this moment convalescing in some Leningrad or Moscow hospital, minus a limb.

It was sheerest luck (by a certain definition) that Mikhail himself wasn't now in some Leningrad or Moscow hospital, preferably with all his limbs, being fussed over by nurses. Luck was all there was to it. The brave died from the White Finns, and the cowards died from the NKVD if not from bullets in the back, but at least by being brave you stood a chance of doing something useful with the rest of your life. Mikhail would have liked to think that he'd been deliberately brave out there, actually thought out risking his life even more than it was usually risked to help get the army as a whole a bit further along the Isthmus, but even now, trying to sort it out, he didn't remember much in specific. It had been like any other day in the renewed assault this month, with the boom of artillery and the rattle of machine guns and the screams of the charging men and then the screams of the wounded men, etc. When he thought very hard about it he thought he might remember, as in a dream, the bleeding bulk of Captain Semyonov atop him (he thought Semyonov's body might actually have been a shield of sorts, caught some more bullets during the trip back that otherwise would've drilled into Mikhail's own back and legs, but if so the captain lived through them and no one was keen to bring it up). He thought he might remember himself bawling encouragement to those around him. He thought he might remember the attack on the machine-gunner some time later, though the actual moment when the gunner had fallen still eluded him. Before they got to Finland he'd imagined being heroic plenty of times - medals, orders, basking in admiration, cheery letters home, jumping the lines at the shops with a flash of his decorations when he himself reached home. Maybe he'd thought of being heroic sometime that day, too, but if he had it'd been swept clean out of his head by the end of that day. When they were congratulating him, embracing him, chattering on about what he was supposed to have done, at first he'd done nothing but blink back, nonplussed. Even now he wasn't sure if he _really _remembered doing those things or if this was how he imagined what had to have happened since everyone else agreed on it.

Tarasov said Mikhail was likely command material and talked about a military academy. Most of the other boys and men probably _would _piss on Tarasov if he was on fire, for the pleasure of getting away with it in the name of comradely aid, but as to Mikhail they tended to share his opinion, had done so since before Tarasov ever took notice of him, and Tarasov's notice hadn't changed that. It was heady stuff, felt almost like real pull, and Mikhail tried not to get drunk on it. Look what happened three years ago with all those big military men like Tukhachevsky who'd gone and lost their heads.

Each day, at least, the constant pounding of their artillery and the sound of aircraft overhead helped keep the headiness in check. Mikhail found it hard to imagine that anything was still standing behind the White Finnish lines, but obviously something was there to shoot back.

Out he went again. Thinking optimistically, if he kept living maybe he could gamble his way into bicycles for the whole family.

* * *

_Michigan, United States of America, 1 February 1940_

Dear Cousin Elias,

I read in the newspapers about the things you are doing in Finland now. My father heard about it. He wanted to go back and help. Because of everything that is happening, he couldn't. He is very sorry. I think that over there you are all very brave and strong. People who are not in the family are also very brave and strong. I am sure you are one of the very bravest.

We send our regards and wish you luck.

Yours truly,

Alex

* * *

_Ladoga-Karelia, Finland, February 1940_

Elias turned his head to watch Aleksandr, who lay on his back facing the ceiling. One hand had come up out of the blanket and closed on the crumpling material, almost a fist. Elias liked watching his hands; it was in his watching that he noticed little things like how while he wrote and shot (the one time Elias had seen him shoot) with his right hand, he tended to use his left for everything else. His hands were a feature that Elias appreciated out of more than Litany-inappropriate lust; his eyes might be big and his body nearly unmarked and his attitude incongruously submissive, but out of gloves his hands were graceful without being soft, evidently put to frequent use. He'd asked about it once - army training, Aleksandr had said, and months of factory work after he'd left secondary school, before he'd been called up.

He didn't rave about Soviet power, and if what he said was right being in this Komsomol thing didn't mean he was particularly fanatical, but Elias still wasn't privy to whatever seethed in his head. Now he'd shown a little of that, and Elias pounced. Careful, he told himself now. If he came on too strong Aleksandr would just lock it all up again.

Though even if he locked up, he still had ears, so going on wouldn't be pointless. Elias could set to coaxing him out again later.

"To start with," he said, "I know you didn't decide to be here, but someone _did_ send you here. Someone sent hundreds of thousands of men to get mown down, except they didn't think _that _would happen did they? They thought they'd flood us away and be in Helsinki before the week was out. _Someone _set up that puppet show in Terijoki. What did they tell youthey were doing it all for?"

Aleksandr answered, eventually. "We - they said we needed more land between the border and Leningrad, and you wouldn't give it to us even when we offered twice as much in return. They said... they said in Finland you were oppressed, by the fascists and the Whites, and we'd liberate the people. They said they'd shelled one of the villages on the border. Mainila. People died there."

Elias slipped into Finnish forms of invective. "Perkele, what fucking horseshit!" Around them, people twitched and muttered in the dark. He lowered his voice and went back to Russian. "I'll have you know we never knocked a single shingle off a single roof your side of the border. Our big guns were too far back, anyway. No, what _we _saw was shelling from the _other _side. Maybe some officer got plastered. Or _maybe_..."

"How do you know? Did you see them yourself?"

"What, did _you_?"

"No," said Aleksandr, sounding defiant, "but if neither of us saw it, why should I believe you first?"

Elias wanted to shout for a moment at that, but no, it would be stupid to shake his head at Aleksandr's perpetual silence and then strike him back down once he did speak. Fairly reasonable question, when he considered, except that _he _knew the truth. "And why would we do a thing like that, anyway? A stupid thing like that? It's like a gnome kicking a giant. We've, what, four millions? To how many hundred millions? And however we Garou can fight, it's not as if our human army's been indulged in the way of tanks and such. We haven't even got uniforms for everyone - lot of us in the reserves had to bring our own, though at least we know how to kit out. We're holding out, yes, but it's still a stupid thing to have bet on.

"And another thing -"

Aleksandr sat up and starting pulling on his gloves.

"What?"

Aleksandr muttered as he got up, "Latrine."

It might be a dodge, but if so it was a believable one. "I'll go with you."

Aleksandr said nothing to that; Elias scrambled to get his gear on and followed him out of the dugout. "And another thing," he continued in the open air, "We're much less oppressed than you think. I hear planes were dropping leaflets telling us we'd get the eight-hour day we've had for more than twenty years."

"Once," said Aleksandr, "before the encirclement, someone threw leaflets at us from the woods."

"Did you read them?"

"Some people did. They said there were strange letters in them and Politruk Malinovsky laughed at the grammar and said they must think we were all illiterate children."

"But if you were all illiterate there wouldn't be any point in leaflets."

"It's what he said."

"And how's my grammar?"

"It isn't _bad_."

"Good." He thought of learning Cyrillic, and Kolya demonstrating the letter _yat _on the slate set out before them_. Yat _had been a poser for years and he hadn't seen much point to it when there was a perfectly good _e_. "Maybe they were using the old alphabet. The Russians outside of Russia still use it."

"You think they wrote them?"

"The leaflets? Maybe them, or just people who learned it the old way. Like me. I don't suppose anyone paid much mind to them, then. Pity, but then we're even there."

"They put them in their boots."

They rapidly approached the latrine, now visible in the morning dark. "There's worse things you could do with them."

Elias waited at a distance while Aleksandr answered the call of Gaia; he'd realized on the way over that he wouldn't mind taking a piss himself, but he hung back until Aleksandr started doing up his buttons before saying, as if he'd only just thought of it, "Wait a minute, would you?" Aleksandr waited.

Once they began back to the dugout, Elias started up again. "About not being oppressed. Yes, I suppose not everyone's the absolute happiest here - who is anywhere, with the Wyrm in the world and all? - but they're not so unhappy that they'd rather be _invaded_. Even Toivo and the other Bone Gnawers think it's..." Horseshit, he almost said again. "Nonsense. Nonsense like Kuusinen's charade in Terijoki they're trying to puppet around to the world. Nonsense like that -" _fucking prick _"- Molotov saying it's breadthey're dropping on Viipuri and Helsinki. They give us bread like that, we give them drinks to match."

* * *

Aleksandr remembered: back in the woods, the arc of a bottle in the air, ending when it smashed against a tank in a gout of flame. The tank had burned for a long time.

"And I tell you," said Laukkanen, "they had nothing to worry about from us. There was a treaty and everything. We _keep _our treaties. They want Leningrad out of danger but it's perfectly acceptable if Viipuri's in danger, yes? Because we're so small, who cares what we think? And you know what I think? I think that Leningrad wasn't in any danger from us _then_, but if they give us half a chance now it damn well will be."

Aleksandr buried his hands in his coat pockets and trudged on.

"Oh," said Laukkanen at last. "Sorry. It's not anything personal. It's just..." He muttered something in Finnish. "What do you say to getting breakfast?"

They changed course to the field kitchen, which he'd noticed gave off an astonishingly thin trail of smoke, where the cook ladled them oatmeal and Laukkanen went on to acquire mugs of coffee. In the front room of the house they spooned up the oatmeal and drank the coffee and Aleksandr thought, as he tried not to, about where Laukkanen would be going after this. Why did he try not to? For his own peace of mind? What had he done to deserve that peace?

"About the Silver Fangs," said Laukkanen, who'd finished quickly. Aleksandr scraped the bottom of his bowl to build up a last spoonful. "Now, in Finland we're not much for kings and queens either. I'm told there was some talk about getting one in after independence, some German Gleaming Eyer I think, but that fell through after Germany folded. But that's the human side, and we're only half human. These days when a human says God says they ought to be king, people laugh at them, but the thing is, for the Silver Fangs that's _true_. God hasn't said so, if he even exists, but Helios and Luna and Falcon and such have, and we ought to pay attention to that."

Helios and Luna and Falcon - powerful spirits, according to Laukkanen, of a sort Aleksandr had yet to see. So far on their visits to the Umbra he'd only seen the ones lower in the hierarchy, the ones called Jagglings and Gafflings. Above them, according to Laukkanen, stood the Incarna and the Celestines, but so far he had no actual proof of their existence. "Have you ever...?"

Laukkanen tipped his head sideways. "Ever what?"

"Ever seen them?"

"Helios and Falcon and Luna themselves? No, but I don't need to to know. This was centuries ago, millennia ago, and it's been passed on ever since. It's not as though they've revised things."

"Oh." Aleksandr finished the last of the oatmeal. "Have you ever seen a... an Incarna, or a...?"

"Oh, yes. An avatar of Great Fenris in my Rite of Passage, and of the Snow Queen when our pack was looking for a totem. Why do you ask?"

"I was wondering," said Aleksandr. It was essentially a lie, and he was sure it showed.

Laukkanen looked as if he was about to say something else, but then someone approached and he stood up, throwing up an arm in salute. Aleksandr stood as well, seeing a Finnish officer in front of them. He thought he'd seen the face somewhere in the camp before, but if so he hadn't seen it for a while now.

Laukkanen spoke to the officer in Finnish. Aleksandr understood him when he said, "Lieutenant Lind." Then he said something else.

Lieutenant Lind said something back and looked over at Aleksandr. His face was set, appraising.

Laukkanen turned to him and said, "Would you go back to the dugout?"

Aleksandr walked back by himself; they were still talking as he closed the door behind him.

* * *

"You're fond of the prisoner."

The lieutenant headed Elias's platoon and took their captain's borrowing him for translation with fair humor, insofar as he had humor. He had made a quick recovery from his injuries during the raid, and Elias supposed Jokela's covert attentions had something to do with it.

Elias shrugged. "A lot of the men have taken to him, sir."

"With you in the lead." Lind's face still held no hint as to his opinion on this state of affairs.

Was this something like how Nieminen had felt? "Naturally, sir. Generally easier to take to someone when you know what they're saying."

"Hm. How long has he been here, now?" Elias thought back, counted back, but before he could answer Lind continued. "I should think it's long overdue for him to be sent west."

This was true enough, and the real reason it hadn't happened was something to be kept behind the Veil. "Captain Jokela gave permission for him to stay."

"Then I'll speak with him about it. Keeping a prisoner on the front lines is risky, especially this unrestrained. He could run."

"All due respect, sir, I don't think he'd want to run. Not to a motti. Not when here he has hot food and a good sauna and people aren't trying to shoot him. And if he tried to go past the mottis, he'd freeze to death if someone didn't catch him first. And he knows it. Sir."

"We may not be trying to shoot him, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. If the Soviets find us or the motti tries to break out, he could be caught in the crossfire. Especially since he's lost most of his uniform."

True enough, too, and Elias couldn't tell him that Aleksandr was a good bit more resilient than the human average.

"Sergeant Laukkanen," said Lind, and now he sighed, "I know you've taken a liking to the boy, but in that case you have to think about what's best for _him_."

"I'll do that, sir."

Lind evidently doubted that. But still, he turned and walked across the room to rap sharply on the office door. "Come in," Jokela called, and he did. Elias wondered what Jokela could say that might satisfy him.

* * *

While Laukkanen left for the day, Aleksandr reread Tolstoy; he remembered those of the stories he'd read in school, and this helped him figure out and then skim the old-fashioned letters. Eventually, he went to the field kitchen with Salo for lunch. After that he switched to Chekhov for a stretch. Laukkanen came back in the afternoon, mumbled a greeting, and promptly fell asleep.

After sunset, Aleksandr watched as a group of Finns assembled in camp, all of them draped in white and on skis. He saw the lieutenant, Laukkanen (who'd just had so much coffee in lieu of his interrupted sleep that Aleksandr had to wonder how far he could get before he had to stop and piss), Ruotsalainen, Koskinen, and several others he was acquainted with among them. They glided into the woods and vanished between the trees.

Aleksandr spent some crowded time in the little sauna with two other soldiers named Ranta and Kyander. By this point it felt very nearly like being in the banya with comrades. Some exercises, and then dinner, and then sleep.

He woke up when he heard them coming back in. Some shouts, some whoops, soldiers filtering into the dugout. "It won't be very long now," Laukkanen muttered when he finally came in, and once again collapsed beside him. Aleksandr lay down again and followed his lead.

* * *

The next night, after another of the gradually lengthening days of waiting in the snow for someone in the motti to get careless, Elias found the time for another lesson in the Penumbra. As Aleksandr latched the office door, Elias turned to Jokela. "Lieutenant Lind talked to you about him." Lind had only spoken to him as absolutely necessary during the night's raid, so the exact content of his time with the captain remained a mystery.

"He did," said Jokela. "From his point of view, his concerns are entirely justified."

"But -"

"I know. I said that if he was amenable to staying, then it wouldn't be a very big risk to let him." Elias didn't suppose Lind was satisfied with that.

The first thing he noticed after stepping sideways was that the top of his makeshift flagpole had been snapped off and the flag was nowhere to be seen. Well, spirits did fiddle about. The second thing, immediately afterward, was the howling at a distance, voices he recognized. Ilmari - Jalmari - _Marita_? And the howls themselves -

He turned to Aleksandr, beside him. Aleksandr heard it, too. Even as his mouth opened to ask, Elias shouted quickly, "Fight over there. Wyrm!" Next moment he'd thought himself into lupus form and started sprinting toward the sound, dodging between the trees, howling a reply. Seconds later, he heard Aleksandr behind him, joining in.

It seemed to take so long to reach the pertinent part of the Penumbra that Elias was almost surprised when they finally arrived, bursting through the trees to an old, beaten trail which made a narrow battlefield. The battle was well underway; one Crinos form lay bleeding heavily a ways down the path next to what looked like a massive pile of shattered white porcelain dripping with black bile (Jalmari had a Gift like that), out of it for now. Ilmari, Elias saw when he got closer. Marita and Jalmari, also in Crinos and wounded, continued to dart around the massive Bane's strikes. Marita wielded a warhammer - Ilmari had left his at the sept, was it his? The Bane itself was indistinct in the Penumbral gloom. Best as he could make out it seemed to stand on two legs, which weren't moving, but its "head" was a writhing, featureless grotesquery and its "arms" kept retracting and extending at various points around the top of its nebulous torso, wielding a nasty-looking blade of the same translucent stuff in each. Elias watched Jalmari parry one blade and then land a hit with his klaive; as malleable as that stuff looked, the noise it made was as though Jalmari had tried to drive it into stone.

Elias let out another howl, bulked up to Hispo, and leaped forward.

* * *

It happened so fast that there almost wasn't time for Aleksandr to decide otherwise. For a few minutes, still in the form of a wolf, he ran about underfoot; then, with a quick glance at Laukkanen as he worried at the thing's leg, he took the same form - the dire wolf - and, not understanding the frantic shouts in High Tongue flying back and forth between the other combatants, settled for worrying at the other leg once he caught sight of it and hoping he wasn't missing something crucial. Even in Hispo, the thing seemed to tower over him, seemed as tall as a pine tree; the legs themselves could be a thinner sort of trunk.

_Left!_ Laukkanen barked in the language of wolves, and Aleksandr barely dodged a swinging blade that scuffed the Penumbral ground. Once back in range, Aleksandr bit down about where the ankle would be and felt like his teeth would break. Then the thing drew its other leg back and kicked Laukkanen back toward the trees; Aleksandr, warned, let go and drew back fast enough that "all" the next kick did was tumble him over once and wind him for a few seconds; he got his breath back in time to dodge the blade. Laukkanen staggered forward, then ran the remaining distance back into the fray.

One of the others in Crinos let out a howl that was partly shriek, and the next moment, before his teeth returned to somewhere like the thing's ankle, Aleksandr heard the crack as that one shoved a large silver dagger into the thing's torso; though the thing's body looked like it might be made of glass, it engulfed the blade and concealed it until it was yanked out again. The thing lurched; Aleksandr dodged, abandoning his just-established grip. The one with the dagger (a klaive?) knocked aside an emerging arm and kept stabbing at that one spot, howling all the while. He had hardly been sedate before but now he was all fire; there was an incredible strength behind the movement of his arms. Aleksandr thought he might even glimpse cracks webbing outward on the glass of the thing's body.

He barely had time to observe this power before it was gone; the Garou faltered, and in the next instant the thing's swinging arm knocked him to the ground, landing like a rag doll, the dagger's hilt torn from his grasp. The Garou twitched where he fell, his movements now as feeble as a leveret's. The thing's blade swept high, caught the thin light without flashing, and shot downward; it tore into the Garou's back as he rolled away, and got another, agonized shriek in return. The Garou with the hammer let out a howl at that and tried to step in the way, but was blocked by a swift repositioning of the other arm. The first arm went up, started down.

Aleksandr jumped and clamped down his jaws on the forearm so hard he was _sure _he'd heard something snap inside them. It didn't hurt until a split second later when the thing's arm jerked to a stop, all momentum ended. Then it began to swing that arm like a shaken pendulum, Aleksandr continuing to bite down and scrabbling with his front paws for a further hold. Another swift movement at the edge of his sight and his side flared up, another burst of pain that seemed to expand all the way to the opposite side of his body, followed by a tremendous chill following the same path. He couldn't breathe to cry out and if he cried out he'd fall. The thing swung its arm about; his tail clipped a tree branch. He thought he saw his own blood falling, almost flying in the wake of the movement of his body. He could feel himself bleed, and marveled that the blood hadn't frozen as it left the vein.

_Child! Hold the creature as Falcon would, child!_

Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Kanyukova, he thought, he believed, he _knew_, and felt a little more strength in the grip of his jaws.

The thing didn't stab at him anymore. Instead it tried to swing him against a tree, but it couldn't get quite far enough. The cries around him now took on a triumphant cast. He glimpsed the other Garou swinging the hammer against the thing's chest or back, and the very bloody one who had dragged himself away from the fight staggered back up to slam the silver dagger deeper in. The thing's arm didn't shift around in its body anymore. It hadn't done, he thought, since he got hold of it.

So he held on as it began to list, then to topple. A crack, and now he wasn't sure if it was his teeth breaking or his teeth breaking _through_. The thing lashed out again as it neared the ground, jarring his hind legs, more flares, but it wasn't nearly as bad this time. And then it no longer moved; even after the blows coming down from above stopped he held on, thinking still that maybe it was somehow faking.

"Aleksandr?" he heard Laukkanen saying some time later. "Aleksandr, you can let go."

* * *

Elias got the story from Jalmari, who propped himself on his elbows and told it with Galliard's aplomb as Marita called on Gaia to heal him and Ilmari. There had been a pair of Banes, he learned. They'd beaten the first one by simultaneous attack, but Ilmari had taken the brunt and they were in less than ideal shape when the second one found them. The warhammer was indeed Ilmari's; Marita had taken it with her when she'd started out from the sept, suspecting where she'd end up going ("It's good work you're doing out here," Marita interjected without turning around, "but it's not as though it leads to a lot of good feeling for the Russians, does it?"). She'd encountered Ilmari and Jalmari on one of the Umbral scouting trips they'd taken to sneaking in while Elias confined himself largely to the Penumbra around camp, and they'd taken the opportunity to track down one of the Banes together.

"You do realize," said Elias with mock pique, "that I am very disappointed in you, leaving me out."

"Thought you had your hands full," said Jalmari. He sounded wrung-out - calling on the Gift of Thor's strength did that. For an hour or two he'd have a hard time even smashing a glass. It was balance of sorts. "Teaching the cub."

"I _was _teaching the cub. He's not that unruly. Not unruly at all, actually. Didn't tell him to come along."

"Don't suppose you told him not to?"

"Saving my breath. No, really. And if we hadn't been there to pin it_ then_ what would've you done?"

"Collected some battle scars, most like," said Marita, glancing over her shoulder this time. "And Jalmari-rhya might've been bisected and we could hardly hope for it to be the right way."

"Dare I ask the right way?"

"Simple. Crossways instead of down the middle. Plenty of folk can live with no legs and he's already managed a trueborn with little Liisa. Yet to hear of anyone hobbling along with half a head."

"I'm _here_, you know," said Jalmari.

Marita turned from Ilmari to him. "So what d'you think would've happened then, Jalmari-rhya?"

Elias went and fetched Aleksandr, who let go of the Bane's arm and stumbled over, staying in Hispo. When Elias looked closely his side looked like it was still bleeding sluggishly, but all in all it wasn't too bad now - his regeneration was working. Elias's tongue prodded at his own teeth - he'd waited in Hispo, too, for his teeth to unchip after his ride on the Bane's other arm. Ilmari stuck with Crinos.

Marita took her hands off his chest, got up and pointed. "Stream over there."

As they walked, Jalmari said, "So that's the cub."

"Yeah."

Jalmari staggered, put his hands out to brace himself against trees, but Elias knew he'd rebuff any offer of help. "You didn't say he was a Fang."

"Wasn't told."

"Marita? Didn't you know?"

"No point, Ilmari-rhya said," said Marita, taking point, bag over her shoulder. "Said they wouldn't take him, anyhow. He'd grown up clueless under the Reds, probably someone's bastard, and Ilmari-rhya thought he was a weakling."

"Huh," said Elias, "knowing that would've saved us all some trouble."

"Knowing what?"

"The bastard thing," said Jalmari. "Got to be, 'cause anyone say the kid's a weakling after what he did back there and I'll -"

"Thought the boys knew."

"Heikki and Veikko? If they ever knew they forgot."

"Fuck, 'course a Ragabash would _ask_. What a fuck-up. I'll check around again back at the sept."

Jalmari glanced over at Aleksandr. "You want I should do the Rite of Wounding?"

"Your choice," said Elias. "You're the rhya. He hasn't even done his Rite of Passage yet, unless this counts. Be tough pulling together all the pomp and circumstance out here."

"I've got us drinks," said Marita. "Meant it for chiminage, but I didn't _promise_ it. And I can burn down something."

At this point they reached the stream; Ilmari plunged in through the thin ice. "Go on," Elias told Aleksandr. "Get off the blood before it gets in your clothes." Aleksandr waded in; Elias knelt on the bank, stuffed his gloves in his pocket, plunged his hands in through the fractured ice and lapped up the silver-lit water from the makeshift cup, rinsed and spat, wiped his hands on his coat before putting his gloves back on. Further from the bank, Marita coaxed spirits into supporting her fire.

"Aleksandr," he called, "for your first battle wound, it's tradition to rub ashes in it. For a proper scar. All right?"

In response, Aleksandr climbed out of the water; Elias stood clear as he shook himself off, and as Marita watched the fire Aleksandr finally returned to homid, sitting on the bank.

"Everything come together right?"

It was surprising how different Aleksandr didn't look. He'd probably had that fierce look while it was happening, but at this point it was gone. Instead he had much of the same amazed look as he'd had after he first shifted of his own will. "I think so."

"Get over here," Marita called.

They got over there and reseated themselves by the fire. "Let's have a look," said Jalmari, miming pulling up his shirt. Aleksandr took off the coat first, and once he did Jalmari blurted, "You gave him that awful thing?"

"Didn't think you'd be too broken up about it," said Marita.

"I don't know," said Elias, "I think it suits him." He bit his tongue before it could continue with _Brings out his eyes. _That would really be going too far. Instead, he added laughingly, "Perkele, I'll be happy to appreciate Hilja and her knits if you won't," before explaining the exchange to Aleksandr, and the origin of the sweater.

"Oh," said Aleksandr, and in halting Finnish, "Thank you and your wife, Jalmari-rhya."

Jalmari looked at Aleksandr, then at Elias. "Didn't know he spoke Finnish."

"He's picked up a bit."

He turned back to Aleksandr. "Aw, cub, it's nothing."

"Jalmari-rhya says it's nothing."

While they spoke, Ilmari splashed out of the stream and Aleksandr hooked his fingers under the hem of the sweater and pulled, taking shirt and undershirt with it. They all looked intact, at least - dedicated clothes could have strange interactions with injuries. As for the injury, it was a ragged line along his right side which had regenerated all the way to closing. Jalmari clicked his tongue at it. "Have to reopen it to do properly."

Elias translated. "Happens a lot," he added, "us being as we are. It's usually not practical to keep it unhealed all the way to the sept unless it's from silver or something. I had to have mine redone, too. Guaranteed it hurts less than the first time."

Aleksandr nodded.

"Might as well take it all off," said Jalmari. "Awkward doing a rite holding your shirt up. This thing's improvised enough already."

Elias translated again; Aleksandr nodded and shed the layers while Jalmari unsheathed his puukko and tested the edge. Marita glanced over from where she was carefully extracting ash. "He's skinnier than _you_."

"So he is. Now hold still - shit." Jalmari returned his puukko to his sheath. "Still tuckered out. 'll probably fumble. Can you do it?"

"Shouldn't be a problem."

Aleksandr held still, his eyes open and staring ahead, as Elias meticulously followed the line of the original wound with the tip of his own puukko. His skin was like milk and Elias thought he saw gooseflesh rise on his arms and torso - the Penumbra here was hardly Helios-kissed as the Mediterranean. That wasn't the only thing rising- the darker nubs on his chest were stiff, too, as they got with cold, perfectly natural, but even so _why was he noticing this_?

He knew damn well why.

Jalmari looked now to Aleksandr's left side, probably to the scar already there. "He get shot?"

"Yeah," said Elias, wiping off the blade. "That's how he Firsted. One of our men at his motti. Don't think it counts, does it?"

"Don't think so either. Marita?"

"Got it."

Jalmari took up a handful of ash. He smeared this in turn into the wound, and as he did he began to intone with an abrupt if appropriate solemnity. Even with only the five of them, he pronounced the words of the High Tongue with all due ceremony. Elias translated it equally formally. Jalmari paused when it came to his name. "Aleksandr Novikov," Elias filled in. That was fitting. A lot of Silver Fangs thought so highly of their families' noble names that they didn't see the need for a deed-name as well. Aleksandr was proud of his family if he wasn't of himself.

Aleksandr sat listening. He'd winced several times during the recutting and when the ash went in, but his face soon stilled into something like his usual expression, though Elias was positive _something _had changed in it. Marita and Ilmari continued to feed the fire as they listened. Of course they'd all been there when it happened, had at least the general idea, but Jalmari's rendition was no less impressive.

Finished, he clapped his hands once and turned to Marita, who reached into her bag and produced a bundle wrapped in what looked like an extra sweater. A large bottle emerged from this nest; Marita yanked out the cork with her teeth and passed it to him, followed by a wooden cup. He hefted the bottle high, viewing it critically. "Strong stuff?"

"Very."

"Big bottle."

"Spirits can have massive heads for liquor."

Satisfied with this windfall, Jalmari then turned to Aleksandr, who had just picked up his undershirt. "Hey," he called, and brought out a piece of his smattering of Russian - a lot of people in the east picked up a smattering, if usually not enough to carry on a complex discussion, and Jalmari _was _a Galliard. "Have a drink!"

Aleksandr looked at him like a transfixed rabbit before dropping the undershirt, extending his hands and taking up the bottle and cup smeared with Jalmari's fingerprints marked in a paste of blood and ashes. He poured a short stream into the cup which seemed barely enough to cover its bottom, sipped, and handed it on to Elias. Elias poured himself a good bit more, tossed it back, and shortly after regretted it. "What's _in _this? Fire Gafflings? You make off with a Fianna recipe?"

"Spirits can be particular."

Ilmari next, then Marita, then Jalmari, and another round ensued. It proceeded more slowly, as Jalmari brought out various simple tales while Elias continued to translate. This time, Aleksandr quickly passed the bottle and cup to Elias without taking his share. Then a final round interspersed with more of the same, Aleksandr abstaining again, and then Jalmari recorked the bottle and finished up his last story, a spooker about a pack who'd gone bear-hunting with their Kin and found themselves in pursuit of a specimen with uncanny ties to the Gurahl. Once Elias had repeated the last sentence in Russian, Jalmari dropped into lupus. Elias followed suit, then Ilmari and Marita, rushing about and howling to Luna while Jalmari retired to renew his strength. Aleksandr was last, shifting only when Elias ran up to him and yipped encouragement.

It didn't approach the nightlong collective mayhem of Elias and his packmates' celebrations (a joke: to see your way to your first scar, go to a Rite of Wounding and they'll gladly share the wealth), but with just the five of them they still made a decent job of it. Mad dashing about turned to roughhousing; Jalmari, the adren, ruled the field once he'd recovered, and bravery notwithstanding Aleksandr was still at the bottom, especially given his hesitation to put his all into it, but Elias and his packmates were a decent match for one another. They wrestled and nipped and when their regenerating bodies burnt off their intoxication they switched to homid for more. In homid, too, they continued their sparring, and carried on constantly shifting between forms. Clothes and boots were flung aside on the bank, so as not to be torn by wolf claws; their constant movement interspersed with periodic growth of fur, and for four of them their constant drinking, kept them warm.

At one point, experimenting with tickling with the brush of his tail, Elias's ears - sharpened as a wolf - were hit by a burst of unfamiliar laughter from above. He looked up; his partner was Aleksandr, in homid, still laughing, and to further idealize the scene Luna's light gave him an excellent view of Aleksandr's face while this was happening - eyes shut, mouth open, head flung back, the lines of his neck and bare shoulders. And the _sound_ of it. That sound alone...

Elias rose up, panting, and thrust his tongue out to lap at throat and collarbone. Aleksandr laughed harder, not stopping when Elias took the opportunity to tumble him to the ground.

* * *

Some time had passed. Tired from exertion in both the fight and the celebration, now they lolled about. Ilmari had retrieved his clothes and pulled them over himself if not on. Marita and Aleksandr were being thorough about it. Jalmari lay sprawled still in lupus, the empty bottle beside him. Elias, in similar disarray in homid, wondered what spirit might accept the bottle itself as chiminage.

"Marita-rhya?" Aleksandr called.

"Yes?"

In Finnish, "How is Veikko?"

"Veikko? Veikko's doing fine."

"Thank you." A silence. "Laukkanen-rhya?"

He looked up to Aleksandr. "There's no need for that. Call me Elias if you like."

"Elias-rhya..." Aleksandr looked, now, back to form, though he _had _obliged. He looked so much the same as usual that Elias might wonder if he had misheard the laughter, pinned it to the wrong person. He put on the sweater; when his head emerged he said, "Hasn't the captain been waiting for -"

"_Perkele_!"

Elias leaped to his feet and scurried about gathering his clothes. The others were roused by this, and he explained in a jumble as he tried to distinguish between his and Jalmari's undershirt, which he eventually determined by holding them up side-by-side. "Lupus," he called to Aleksandr, who was already fully dressed. "It covers ground faster."

However fast they covered ground, there was still the need to constantly pause; they were far astray from Elias's usual pathways, and had to search for their own scent - or rather, for Aleksandr's scent; one of the gifts Elias had learned gave him no scent unless he willed it, which he hadn't thought to will at the time - and for their pawprints. They also looked through the Gauntlet from time to time; when they caught something besides expanses of trees echoing those in the Penumbra, they might reckon their direction from there. By the time they reached the severed flagpole and returned to homid Elias was sobered ten times over, with any lingered mists cleared out of the way by his attempts to figure out how to lie about this. They ranged from saying that Aleksandr had finally agreed to help him with what little a teenage conscript could to saying that they'd been having a tryst out in the woods, freezing to each other in amorous poses, and hoping the sheer absurdity of the claim would carry them through on force of laughter.

Jokela was on them immediately when they reappeared in his office; never before had Elias received such a tongue-lashing from someone with their voice so mild and low. The Russian dictionary still stood in "warning" position on the table. Someone had come in eventually, Jokela confirmed. Multiple people at various times, actually. No, he said he'd been catching some sleep, and nobody seemed to have noticed their absence, but they couldn't _always _be so lucky, could they -

"Sorry," Elias whispered back, "we were fighting a Bane."

Aleksandr glanced over, looking guilty; he'd learned enough Finnish to understand that, and he knew - as did Elias - that they could've been back hours before if they hadn't stayed for the ritual and the miniature revel.

Jokela, too, seemed to pick up on this, and he proceeded to bludgeon Elias with massive amounts of concern and disappointment, which he was less inured to than simple fury. He was reminded of Lieutenant Lind.

But after all, they _had _helped kill a Bane, so eventually he escaped. As Jokela pointed out, even if the men hadn't noticed that they'd unaccountably vanished from the room, they might still notice when they unaccountably appeared from it. Hence, another jaunt to the Penumbra followed; Elias looked through at intervals until they found a secluded spot from which they could emerge and merge discreetly with the rhythm of the camp.

That done, they returned to the dugout. Boots and gloves off, and then on their backs under the blankets, Elias's left side against Aleksandr's right, Elias's feet perhaps in the area of Aleksandr's shins.

"Have a good time?" Elias whispered against his ear, starting to drowse.

A small silence. "Yes. After the..."

"Yes, after that. Is your wound all right?"

"It's fine."

"Good. You did very well, you know."

"Thank you."

Elias was drowsing ever deeper, soon to slip entirely asleep, when Aleksandr spoke again, in his hesitant way. "Did you think I was crying in the morning because the Silver Fangs wouldn't have me?"

He _had _thought that, first thing to come to mind - it wasn't as if Aleksandr cried like that on other nights before the Silver Fangs came, so it was easy to take it as cause and effect. Who knew what they'd been saying to him while Elias was keeping watch? He figured it could be humiliating, being told you weren't up to snuff, and at the same time getting a second and third opinion that someone in your family line had most likely been fucking around with a prince, that they weren't quite as straight-spined and virtuous as previously assumed. "That's what I guessed. It wasn't that, I take it?"

"It didn't... it didn't make me _sad _or anything like that."

He remembered Aleksandr's fists hanging at his sides. Remembered what Aleksandr had said the morning after, his sharp rejection which could very well _not _be sour grapes, which had made Elias decide that confrontation was in order. "Would you mind if I asked what made you sad?"

Elias listened to the mingled breathing in the dugout until Aleksandr murmured, flat and regularly paced, "I want to go home."

The words were so blunt it gave Elias pause in turn. "I don't see why you shouldn't," he said at last. "The war's got to end someday. There's got to be _some _Garou there that can see to you."

"Oh. Thank you."

"What, for telling you that? I have nothing to do with it. It's nothing but facts."

"For telling me that. If I'd been a Silver Fang, do you think I could still go?"

Elias batted around the possibility that somehow they shared the new moon. "I don't know. If they'd had you, they might've thought it was too risky for you to stay there. Worried about growing up with the right attitude and that kind of thing. I mean, they're living _here _now, not _there_. But there were others who stayed."

"They said Prince Volkovsky stayed."

"Well, I suppose they'd know. The Prince Volkovsky they think was your...?"

"Konstantin Anatolyevich Volkovsky. That one."

"Right. That one. Well, I guess if anyone _he _might have a better idea how it happened, if he's still around."

"He might," he said in that same flat voice, and Elias doubted Aleksandr actually wanted to know the dirty details of just how the "Ragabash Prince" might have insinuated himself unseen.

"Mind if I ask what home's like?"

Aleksandr hesitated. He spoke like he wasn't sure what Elias wanted to hear. "It's an apartment. Communal. We have a very large room, five square meters each."

"One room?"

He sounded bemused, and only now a little embarrassed. "Yes. But it's a large one and we put up curtains. I think the whole apartment belonged to someone rich once, but it was broken up after the revolution. My father says there used to be a chandelier on the ceiling, but they took it out. You can see the hole there."

Elias made a suitably impressed sound.

"And... and, we share the kitchen, so there's a schedule for who cooks dinner first. It's very organized. Mostly grandmother cooks for us, because mother and aunt Taisiya have to work. And... what's yours like?"

Elias whispered then, for some time, about his village - disproportionately Fenrir Kinfolk - and his aunt and uncle Koskinen, and the time before Helena got married, and the days before his First Change when he'd laid traps and gone hunting with just puukko and rifle, and how he'd economized on bullets afterward. Aleksandr whispered back about streetcars and parades and the lines at the stores. Back and forth until Elias at last whispered, "Sleep well," and followed his own advice. 


	7. If Only

** Chapter Seven: If Only**

It was a machine-gunner, this time. His head snapped back, his hands up as if in belated surrender. Before he finished falling Elias was skiing away at speed.

He wondered if he might be slipping. He hadn't expected any difficulties when he was called up - he'd already spent years in the war against the Wyrm, he wasn't some raw kid who puked after his first kill, no, he'd left his first kill long behind and he hadn't puked then either, he'd learned the ropes long before his compulsory year in the army, and what was a tank to someone who'd slain a Pattern Spider? But over time he'd started noticing and paying more attention to details like the way their hands flew up, and the way they pressed close for warmth while caught between the deep cold and the vulnerability of the campfires, and the way they cried out with pain and screamed, and the way they _didn't _scream but stared, dull-eyed...

Back at camp, Aleksandr wasn't at their dugout. He was directed to another one, where Kyander had organized a sing-song. He arrived to the accompaniment of Aleksandr's singing voice, halting and tremulous, nothing that would win prizes, but with an authentically mournful inflection - "The heroes ride over the field, hey, the heroes of the Red Army..."

When he slipped into the dugout, Aleksandr stopped on the verge of a word and looked like he wanted to drop dead. This brought protests from among his audience; others, like Salo, lounged against the walls doing their best to give the impression that they were present by sheer coincidence. "Go on, Santeri," said Kyander, giving him an encouraging smile.

"Yah, go on," put in Ranta.

Elias nodded at him, smiling at well, and he resumed, continuing to stare anxiously over at Elias. "... the girls are crying, the girls are sorrowful today, their sweethearts went away for a long time, hey, their sweethearts went away to the army..." When he finished he looked grateful to step down for someone else who, in the wake of that apparent novelty act, won the audience over with some renditions of the familiar. The climax was an impromptu chorus of "Our Land," in which Elias whispered the lyrics to Aleksandr and Aleksandr applauded politely at its end.

"What, did you think I'd bust you for spreading propaganda?" Elias asked him after the minor festivities wound down and everyone dispersed, including them. "Doesn't matter much if they don't even know what it says, does it?"

"They were all asking me to sing something," Aleksandr whispered. He carried something fabric over his shoulder, light blue that matched his eyes. "At first all I could think of was 'The Internationale.'"

Elias stifled a laugh at the image of Aleksandr embarrassedly exhorting the oblivious gathering to world revolution. "I get it. No problems there?"

"No, no problems. Then later they wanted another one. I'd been trying to think of something cheerful, like from a film, but I couldn't remember all the words to any of them."

Probably for the best, thought Elias. He knew now that Aleksandr's face wouldn't crack like porcelain if he laughed, but he still found it hard to imagine him pulling off something cheerful.

"So I thought of two, and the other one was a lot worse."

"How much worse?"

"It's called 'Suomi the Beautiful.'"

One word stuck out in the midst of the Russian. "Better than 'the Hideous.' 'Suomi'?"

"It's a marching song."

"What's it like?"

"You won't be angry?"

"If I would, would I ask you?"

"All right. It goes like this..."

He whispered the lyrics, without melody, in their dugout, as he set down the blue thing - which proved to be a shirt - dug a sewing kit out of a coat pocket, and threaded a needle. "... We are used to victories, and again we are at war. Under the red star, we go by the roads of our grandfathers. Many lies were told these years, to fool the Finnish people...

"... We are coming to help you punish, to return your disgrace manifold." He was looking up at the ceiling. "Meet us, Suomi the beautiful, decorated with transparent lakes. And that's it."

Elias nodded. "Good thinking." If nothing else, the appearance of the name of their own countrymight have made the others curious for a translation, and if his own appalled hilarity was any indicator he didn't suppose Aleksandr would have taken the massed reaction very well.

* * *

After that last close call, the captain had restricted their office visits. Elias (he was getting used to thinking of him as Elias) had said that it was fine, he'd had enough of the Penumbra to last him a while. What he needed, said Elias, was to return there periodically - to find a private place, preferably in land as untouched by the Weaver as possible, and go sideways for a minute or so, and hopefully keep a mirror on hand. Aleksandr suspected it wouldn't be so simple in Leningrad. Though there were parks - maybe those would work.

The pace of his lessons had slowed. Elias spent more time in digressions, trying now to be both a teacher and something like a friend. Aleksandr tried not to think too hard about Golubev, or to think too hard (Mikhail had said this of him once, that he thought too hard) about all the reasons why he was probably dead, all the reasons Elias had told him.

For the moment, Aleksandr concentrated on the shirt. It wasn't a uniform shirt; it was what they called "model Cajander" in jest, as this man Cajander's lack of money for the army meant many of the soldiers brought clothes from home. This particular piece was Kyander's, and it had given out at the seam where sleeve joined shoulder. Since he was sitting at camp all day doing next to nothing and he was not bad at detail work, he seemed a natural choice for Kyander to ask about repairing it, and Aleksandr had agreed accordingly.

It wasn't a very _large _thing, was it? Nothing of great strategic importance. Could one stitched seam eventually lead to someone's life or death? Was it a minor Finnish victory that he sat here sewing up one of their soldier's shirts? He wouldn't get a satisfactory answer from himself, he knew. He knew very well that if he was committing some treason, he wouldn't want to judge it as such.

When Elias called his name, he finished his stitch and looked up; Elias was only around at certain times, and he had plenty of other time for sewing. Elias looked to the book he'd left closed atop his bag, the Tolstoy. "Which one are you on now?"

He _would _ask that today. "'A Prisoner in the Caucasus.'"

"Oh, I remember that one." And now Elias was looking at him, appraisingly. Aleksandr tried to guess what he wanted. Another performance? "Would you rather be in the Caucasus, do you think?"

Aleksandr tried, then, to guess why he'd asked that. "They don't do things like that in the Caucasus anymore." Though from the Caucasus, he couldn't help thinking, he could take a train. Elias had given back his internal passport and his other papers once he'd reviewed them for intelligence. The main problem would be explaining how he'd ended up there, if it was something inexplicable. The explicable - suppose he'd been assigned there, in a garrison, far away from Finland? When would he have known about being a werewolf, if he'd ever have known? Would his life ever have been as threatened in the Caucasus?

Was Elias trying to draw a parallel or break one?

"It was one of the first ones I read," said Elias. "The style, you see, the language. It's very simple..."

And wound in with that, he started to tell Aleksandr about the Rybalkin family.

Lyudmila Rybalkina had been the wife of a tsarist officer who also happened to be a Theurge of the Get of Fenris. Colonel Rybalkin had been in the White Guard and died at some point; Elias didn't know which war he'd been a casualty of, especially as the suffering of one war was supposed to have fed the Wyrm in the other. Lyudmila and her children had fled to Finland and made contact with the Fenrir community there. When as a child Elias expressed an interest in learning Russian, he'd been sent to Lyudmila, who'd taught herself Finnish in the intervening years and tutored him with the help of her library and her three children. Elias counted them off - Marya, Nikolay, Valentina.

"Kolya especially," said Elias. "He was older enough that I particularly looked up to him - yes, I know, I'm always looking up to people, I look up to _you _for crying out loud - but not so old that he couldn't be bothered with me at all."

* * *

Elias had been twelve when the lessons started and took to Kolya immediately, then admired him a long time before starting to think that along with someone he wanted to _be _he was someone Elias just _wanted_. He remembered Kolya's broad shoulders and chest, his oft-ruffled mane of dark hair, the muscle visible when he rolled up his sleeves at the writing table and when he undid the top buttons of his shirt in summer. He remembered how when Elias asked "Are you named after that tsar Nikolay?" the exact way Kolya had said "Yes." He remembered how Kolya was so solemn at first that it was particularly satisfying the first time he got him to laugh. He remembered Kolya's interest in the fowl and rabbits Elias brought in by way of payment (Viktor Fire-Eye had loved to hunt, Lyudmila told him once, but Kolya had been too young to join him), the time spent preparing the carcasses together. He'd had crushes for long before, and he'd hankered after a particular sort of attention from a series of other boys interspersed with the succession of girls, but it wasn't until Kolya that he put the same name to it that he already knew for what he wanted with girls.

Though once, when he was maybe five or six, not long before his mother died, he'd told her he wanted to marry Yrjo, who was a boy he often played with then. At the time it sounded fun, something to look forward to. His mother had laughed and told him it didn't work that way, and he'd asked her how it did work, but he hadn't thought whatever her answer had been was important enough to remember, and he definitely hadn't thought she'd die before the year was out.

Kolya's Russian wasn't perfect, by any means. By then he'd lived in Finland longer than he'd lived in Russia, and it was thanks to Lyudmila's tooth-and-nail persistence that he retained as much as he did. He interpreted for his mother when complex conversation was required at the bank and such, and he sat in so often on Elias's first lessons for this purpose that it seemed only natural that he should take it up himself. In preparing to tutor Elias, he brushed up on his own command of his language, and this suited Lyudmila perfectly.

He remembered one summer a year after the lessons began, he'd invited Kolya to the village, to go swimming in the nearby lake, in silent hopes of seeing more of him in a literal sense. He'd seen plenty of that, but he'd also seen Kolya looking at him in particular ways, puzzled and then vaguely uncomfortable, culminating in their first sharing of the Koskinens' sauna during which for once neither of them said a word. He knew something, Elias thought, and with that _he _began to know. Here it was suggested that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and he had been, and he hadn't invited Kolya again for a long time though he still saw him at the Rybalkins' house, feeling as though he ought to be furtive about it.

He'd made his investigations once he felt confident enough, or at least not terrified enough not to. One path these investigations led him down, one of many that eventually converged on his sixteenth name day, was to a slim novel tucked away behind a dictionary in Lyudmila's rescued library. It was called simply _Wings_. It had been published when she was only sixteen, and Kolya hadn't heard of it. When he asked Lyudmila about it she said, flushing slightly, that it had been such a scandal when it came out that she'd inveigled a wild friend of the family into procuring her a copy to see what all the horror was about. Of course, she understood, now Elias had to see what all the horror was about. This curiosity carried him through to when he started thinking that amidst all the fuss about art and such he was brushing up against something familiar in its scandal. When he set down the book, closing it on Vanya preparing to fly off to Italy with Stroop, he set down another path that led him, between here and that name day, to looking up the Roman emperors referenced and to poring over a map of Denmark. And some weeks after that name day, Lyudmila would present him with _Wings_ wrapped in brown paper, by which he understood that now she knew too though she said nothing about it.

Meanwhile, after he finally realized about Kolya, it was as though something had unleashed the flood. He didn't much care for Yrjo anymore, he'd gotten tedious and self-important with age, but there were others he started realizing he noticed that way. For one there was Jalmari Tikkanen, who was nearly ten years older than him, loose-limbed and wiry and affable. He hadn't known quite what Jalmari was yet, didn't yet know him as Fleet-Of-Foot, but he did know that for a long time he loved watching Jalmari go running, half-flying across the ground, changing direction on the head of a pin. Jalmari nearly always had a word for a cub.

For another there was Dima, fair-haired and high-cheekboned, one of Kolya's entirely human friends among the other children of runaway White Russians. Dima was the son of a baron whose lands were stuck back in Russia, and while tagging along on visits to Dima's withering parents Elias put his etiquette lessons into practice. He well remembered Dima's gratifying surprise when Elias first spoke up during their discussion of the Russian literature their parents pressed on them (Kolya hadn't been surprised; he'd walked Elias through the translation of the relevant piece the week before). He remembered trying not to stare at the movement of Dima's swanlike neck and throat as he drank - or, for that matter, at the movement of Kolya's throat.

At these gatherings there was also eventually Kirill Belyev, courting Dima's sister Vera; after the losses the Silver Fangs had taken in Russia they were gathering to them what noble families remained. Vera had no idea about this part, but she took well to Kirill, as a lot of women did; Elias was relieved to note that while Vera herself was nice enough to look at as well as be around and he certainly acknowledged the imposing figure the young Theurge cut, he didn't see his appeal. He'd known by then what he was, what Kirill was, and he'd guessed it was a natural thing, some part of him recognizing the spiritual incest of it (even then he had no explanation for why this part of him didn't work when it came to Jalmari, and he hadn't yet considered why there was a need for a rule in the first place if there was such a safeguard). When talking to Kirill, there was finally some justification for his initial arguments for learning Russian. Kirill was flattered by the effort.

Kolya had always been the first for him, in those years. Dima wasn't _his _friend, and Jalmari was _so _much older he seemed entirely out of reach, and etcetera, etcetera. Kolya might have suspected him at the lake, but none of that showed when he helped Elias with the aggravating _yat _and set him exercises. Elias wished sometimes he was again new enough to Cyrillic that he could make his hand wobble, spill out misshapen letters, so that Kolya would put a large hand on his to guide him. But to earn Kolya's smile, he'd long ago improved his penmanship so that reverting now would be unbelievable.

* * *

He didn't say anything in that way, not straight out, but Aleksandr was reminded of when his father talked about meeting his mother in the factory before the revolution. He and Mikhail and Fyodor all had the story by heart: how his father wasn't at war because his leg was bad, broken as a child and never healed right (knowing this, maybe, taking this so-close example to heart, was part of why he was so much more cautious in that way, got into so much fewer scrapes than his brothers, because even if the hospitals were better now the thought of all that trouble on his account...). How his mother helped him get around at the end of especially long working days (and they were _especially _long in those days) when the leg pained him. How they'd joined the crowds in the March demonstrations, his mother helping his father again whenever he tired. How they'd first kissed in the days after the tsar fell, how they'd finally married at the civil registry some months after Kerensky fell that November.

With all the stories twisting around like ribbons in the wind, loyalty on one side and treason on the other, all the paper pasted over pictures in their textbooks and all the pages torn out (he was an expert, at this point, at their neat extraction, and sometimes the neat replacement with provided pages), this story stayed fairly constant. Only the flavor changed, mention of names like Trotsky and Bukharin discreetly omitted. It had a unique texture to it, in his experience. It wasn't the same as the way his grandmother talked about his grandfather, because he'd died of typhus before Aleksandr and Mikhail were born. It wasn't the same as the way aunt Taisiya talked about Yulia's father, because he'd run away from his wife and child and left nothing but his name, not even bothering with a postcard to mark their divorce - aunt Taisiya never actually said his name, not when she had so many salty substitutes to spare, but Yulia's full name was Yulia Vasilyevna Vinogradova so it was easy to guess. It wasn't the way Mikhail and Fyodor talked about the girls they liked, because it never had time to really grow old and steady for them.

Maybe if Elias hadn't called him handsome all those nights ago Aleksandr wouldn't be seeing this in the same way, but as it was he saw it the way he saw it, and heard it the way he heard it. He heard the fond way Elias's words curled around his descriptions, the way he spoke with wistful sighs about long evenings spent bent over books with this Nikolay Viktorovich Rybalkin who he spoke of in the familiar form. He saw the way Elias's gaze unfocused and then refocused on something years behind him. And after Elias finished, his gaze lingering, he dared whisper, "You said you liked men like you liked women?"

"Hmm? Yes, I did say that, didn't I?"

"What's it... what's it like?"

"What's it like?" Elias stretched, arms up, hands interlaced. "What's that supposed to mean? It's like liking women. It's just that a lot more people don't care for it and you might get arrested and such. Here, anyway. I suppose there's a law over there, too?"

"There is."

"Some places haven't got them, though. I looked them up. There was a time..." Elias let out another sigh before chuckling, stretching his laced hands out in front of him. "... there was a time I thought I might go off to Denmark and find myself a place at a caern there. I figured I knew enough Swedish, which I hear isn't so different, I could muddle through all right. There was even a time I would've settled for Germany, after all I heard about it, except they started paying attention to their law again. So. Remember the last time you saw a pretty girl and started getting an itch? It's like that, but with men. Simple enough."

That particular detail, he already knew, was true for him, but he couldn't think of it as simple. "Oh. Is it... hard for you?"

"Hard? Not particularly." Elias shrugged. "I might be distracted by more people than the average, there's more of a range to choose from after all, but it's not as if it's a _big _distraction. Usually. Like I said - did I say it? - sorry about that."

Aleksandr nodded.

Judging from his frown, this didn't seem to satisfy Elias. "And I'm sorry, too, that your first impression was so rotten. Yes, I was a gigantic..." He seemed to cast about for an expletive of suitable strength; finding none, he flung up his hands, uttered something Finnish, and went on. "... but I want to let you know, I wouldn't have done it." He had told this to Aleksandr already, but this time he didn't ask if he had. "And I want to let you know, too, that kind of thing isn't anything the same as just liking men. People don't understand that, sometimes. Like with Sodom... no, you wouldn't know about that, would you? Over there?"

"I don't think so."

"Well, it's nonsense anyway. Anyway, when I was trying to figure myself out I found a Christian story about this place called Sodom, where the men came out in a mob to rape some travelers. The travelers were also men. And because of that the place got burned down. That's the very short version that has everything that matters to what I'm saying right now. It's a good thing I knew better than to believe that kind of thing. But people believed it for hundreds of years, they still believe it, and they get the raping mixed up with the having sex with men. So that's why here, at least, they call sex with men 'sodomy' - _sodomiasta_, in our language, in Finnish - even when there's no raping involved. Understand me so far?"

Aleksandr nodded. At home, of course, they were busy shaking off religion, keeping only things like New Year's trees (they'd been Christmas trees once), but he understood. At home they sometimes called it pederasty, which he'd looked up as discreetly as possible - there was another word on the same page of the dictionary which he had ready as an excuse, though he supposed if he were questioned he'd have blushed and stammered enough to give himself away anyway - and it turned out to mean, strictly speaking, only men having sex with boys. At the time he'd certainly wanted, even as he didn't want the wanting, to have _something _with Lev Isayev, but they were _both _boys then so he'd thought surely it didn't quite count. Not under this particular reckoning.

"It's not as though men who like women that way all go about raping _women_ all the time, so why would men like me all go about raping men? When you think about it, it makes no sense."

Aleksandr wasn't sure whether Elias was still trying to apologize for all that had happened on the first day or if he was chiding him for misconceptions about men who liked men that way or both.

"What I did was stupid, but I never _meant _to do anything of the kind, is the thing."

And in answer, Aleksandr wasn't sure if it was commiseration - over this lingering guilt - or exasperation - about being condescended to about this one thing in this new world that he already understood - that finished opening his mouth and shaping the words, "I never wanted to hurt anyone either."

Elias's hands unwove and fell to his sides. He looked down at them where they had landed, slack. He looked back up at Aleksandr. "You're saying...?"

"Yes."

He looked down, he looked up, and he began to laugh, not trying to hide it at all, howling and whooping and tossing his head about. His hands came up again, clutching himself as he rocked against the wall. He laughed until other men in the dugout, awakened, began to curse him. Then it faded into helpless chuckles interspersed with Finnish mutterings, constant shaking of his head as his rocking slowed, stopped. And then he looked back, abashed. "Sorry."

Aleksandr looked back at him.

"I mean, who would have thought... _both _of us..." He kept chuckling, visibly restraining himself from letting it grow again. "If this were some novel we'd fall straight into love now, I suppose, except if this were a novel who'd write us how we are?"

Aleksandr had never read such a novel either; he said nothing.

Elias shook his head a few more times. "But you know that doesn't change anything, right, in that way?"

"I know. The Litany." If it weren't for the Litany, would Elias think it would change things in that way?

"Right. The Litany. Now what?"

"Now what?"

"Is that all you wanted to say?" Elias might have said this in a sharp way, but he didn't. "Just, you know, establishing things?"

"I don't know. I... what else could you tell me about it? I'd like to know that."

"Then I'll tell you, best as I can. So... men. Women, too?"

"Yes."

"Good. I know for some poor bastards of our persuasion women don't do it for them at all. This way you've got some chance of a family with who you'd like."

* * *

_9 April 1934_

Elias was decided: as long as he had such a crazy scheme swirling around in his head giving him no rest, he might as well see if it worked. Kolya would look at him differently after this no matter what, but he would let it out, he'd finally let it out before the pressure of keeping it secret blasted him to Luna. Maybe Kolya wouldn't like it, would call him a pervert or a sodomite or such, and he hated the thought of that, but would it really be better if the only thing stopping Kolya from calling him that was that he didn't _know _to call him that?

He wasn't worried about getting arrested, either - he was sure Kolya wouldn't tell. Kolya was his friend long enough and deep enough not to. Even if he was wrong about that, Kolya knew better than to take a Garou out of the fight over a stupid thing like wanting to fuck men. Was that thinking like a Shadow Lord? Maybe, but there were the facts, and the Shadow Lords did get shit done in their own way.

It was Elias's name day, nearly the opposite side of the year from his sixteenth birthday last October, and Kolya had paid a visit for the occasion, making excuses for his mother and sisters. Elias couldn't think of a better time, so he girded himself for battle in the Fianna style with a few mugs of celebratory beer; this left him more inclined to tip, but certainly wasn't enough to tipsy himself head over heels in the dirt and puke on Kolya. As the celebration started to wind down he steered Kolya away from the other revelers. In the Koskinen barn he checked all the corners for any courting couples who'd gotten the same idea, and then he started laying out something he doubted any of the courting couples had ever thought of, not quite this way. Elias carried in a lantern, setting it down far from what hay was left over from that winter; little light filtered through from the crescent moon beyond the walls.

"Kolya?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to tell you something important. A secret. All right?"

"All right?"

In his head, Elias had put himself through the paces several times. Now, well-rehearsed, he pushed himself up onto his toes and threw his arms around Kolya's chest and said...

Actually, later he wouldn't remember exactly what he'd said. He remembered that this part wasn't so well rehearsed and came tumbling out, words somersaulting over each other. He talked about the Fenrir of Denmark, he talked about mutual intelligibility with Swedish and how the way he picked up languages he was sure he'd get hold of Danish itself in no time. He talked about the law of humans and the law of Garou. He talked about how the Litany prohibited two Garou mating, probably also doing things in the area of mating, but definitely didn't prohibit a Garou and Kin doing the same. On and on. At least once, probably more than that, he'd said, "I love you." It was the done thing to say, in a time like this.

He didn't remember the order it had come out, how many times he'd had to go back and rearrange things into coherence. He didn't remember how long it had taken. What he did remember was how, when he wound down, Kolya looked like he'd caught a Jarlhammer to the gut.

* * *

_February 1940_

"I told you, didn't I, how few of us are born?"

"You told me."

"Remember what I said about it?"

"You said we should have children with Kinfolk, to have as many Garou as possible."

"Unless I'm starting up a new line of them, yes. Kinfolk. And of course I can't very well do _anything _for any line with another man, not without the proper equipment. We Garou," said Elias, "we have a job to do, and that's the most important thing. Things are different for us. We don't much care for this thing the humans have in their heads now about squeezing out as many babies as they can. It makes good cover for _us_ having all our kids, but that's about it."

Aleksandr remembered 1936. The new constitution. His mother and aunt Taisiya, fresh from factory meetings, further discussing the new law on abortion. The idea that with socialism built, what woman would want to get rid of a baby? Aunt Taisiya muttering about Vasily Vinogradov. His grandmother, occasionally clucking and sighing. His father, awkwardly trying to keep to the periphery, out of the way of the women's talk, but five square meters each didn't leave much room for periphery.

"A lot of us wouldn't mind at all if more humans were homosexual and didn't worry about pretending not to be, or having to have kids. Less humans born means less humans to muck about with Gaia, you see. But less Garou to protect Gaia - that's not good, and once we let the numbers go down with us, it's especially hard getting them back up again." Elias sighed, now with exasperation. "Some types think that because of that, a man just _wanting _a man's wrong for us. Which just goes to show that not all Garou are as enlightened about this sort of thing as _I _am, ha."

* * *

_9 April 1934_

After he started to look less bludgeoned in the gut, Kolya reached up and gently pried Elias off of him. He held on to Elias's hands. He said, "We should talk."

"I thought we were."

"You were, yes. Now, may I?"

"Of course."

"It's not any problem with _you_," said Kolya, and from then on Elias knew the important part of his answer.

* * *

_February 1940_

"So, do you want my advice?"

"Yes, please." He could decide whether or not to take it.

"Right, then. What I do is this: I concentrate on the girls. At least we can do that much. If a man catches my eye, well, that's all right, I just tell myself not to expect anything in the long run. And that's not too hard to take and swallow, because I can't expect anything with a lot of the women that catch my eye either. Now, about love."

"Yes?"

"All that moaning about 'one true love,' 'without you I'll die,' that sort of thing, ever feel that way?"

"Not exactly?"

"Good. Now hope it doesn't ever clobber you over the head in future. I know people _can _feel that way, but I'll tell you now, we can't afford to truck with that sort of thing. Fighting the Wyrm's a precarious occupation. We have the gifts we do - the healing, the shapeshifting, the _Gift_-gifts and so on - because we _need _them for what we do, and sometimes even that's not enough. We've got more than our share of widows and widowers and orphans."

Aleksandr nodded, remembering again what Elias had said that first night. "Did you say your mother...?"

"I might have. Yes. Now, Kinfolk aren't in as much danger, day-to-day, but sometimes when the Wyrm can't get at us it gets at them instead. And then there's the normal things that we don't die of so much, but humans do all the time. Say if you'd been just Kin, being Kin wouldn't have done anything about a shot to the heart. So it's not always the Garou that dies first, these situations." He paused. "My father, for instance. He got mixed up in the civil war, our civil war. My mother lasted a few more years - she was very good at what she did."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"For what? But my point is, if you believe that rot about how only one person in all the world will do, then you've got a lot of people left miserable forever and ever, or until they die too. Which, thank Gaia, is not what happens. One of the things you learn very much, being Garou, is that things don't last as long as you want. People die. It happens, and then the people left go on with their lives."

People died, he already knew. People went away. There was Mandowska, who'd kept to herself, for which everyone else was relieved when she'd been ushered out of her tiny room early one morning with a suitcase in hand. Yulia whispered this to them afterward; she'd happened to be up that early for a reason she wouldn't tell the boys. Her door was sealed until a newly married couple - Galkin and Galkina - took her place.

There was Nikanorov the self-important factory manager, who his mother sometimes used to grumble about. One day she'd come home, barely any blood in her face, and mentioned that someone had taken the complaints about him very seriously.

There was Demyan Ivanovych Andriyenko, who'd been a grade above him, who'd been one of the boys Aleksandr caught himself watching after first starting to look at Isayev that way. Andriyenko was a broad-shouldered Ukrainian, considerably shorter than Aleksandr but far sturdier, with tanned skin and sun-bleached hair and high cheekbones and a voice that perpetually demanded attention and a laugh that pealed like the bells of the torn-down churches. He'd been denounced at a meeting, expelled from the Komsomol and then the school as a kulak's son. Just the month before Aleksandr had exchanged his Young Pioneer badge and red kerchief for the badge and card of the Komsomol. He sat at the back at the meeting and couldn't stand to look at Andriyenko - his memory of that time was mainly of the people constantly interrupting Andriyenko's mumbles of denial in a voice no longer nearly so strident and fierce. Andriyenko had a lot more friends than Mandowska and he took most of them with him - either they hadn't picked up that he was hiding something or they were hiding things themselves. One of the ones who wasn't taken was Lev Isayev; Andriyenko, too, had admired him from afar and then from not-quite-as-far. Aleksandr remembered his voice among the denouncers, no longer nearly so upbeat and encouraging, declaring why he had never been as friendly as Andriyenko wanted.

There was Alisa Yefimovna Tkachenko, who'd pounded at the door early on another morning, calling for Vitya between her sobs. Aleksandr, who'd come to the door with some apprehension, had stayed with her while Mikhail ran to wake up Vitaly Yefimovich Tkachenko, the father of the family. Alisa was his sister. Her husband had been arrested, he gathered, in some horrible mistake. He was a Party member in good standing and commended for his work, he'd done nothing wrong, she was his wife and ought to know. He listened to this and felt relieved that the knock hadn't been for them and felt awful for that relief. When Tkachenko got there he gaped at her and shooed Aleksandr and Mikhail away - "Haven't you got school in the morning?" As they made their way back to bed they could still hear them talking, and then they could hear the door slam. When Mikhail asked Tkachenko about it the following evening, Tkachenko rebuffed him in an unusually sharp voice.

Months later, Aleksandr brought it up with Mikhail while they were studying together. "It's probably straightened out by now," said Mikhail. Aleksandr agreed. Knowing nothing else, it was a nice thing to assume had happened.

"So if some man does catch your eye," said Elias, "and you love him, and you don't think you can live without him... well, let me tell you now, you probably can."

* * *

_9 April 1934_

Kolya had been eminently reasonable, if embarrassed about it. He'd explained, very reasonably, why he didn't think a thing like that could last, and why pretending it could last would make ending it worse. And it would have to end. They needed to find mates, they needed to have children. Elias should know this already, he didn't say outright, but Elias could think it for himself.

"It's nothing wrong with you."

And he _had _guessed at it, he told him, for some years. He'd made the comparison jokingly at first - imagined only that eager little Elias was _acting _like a boy in love (Elias was relieved, a little, that he hadn't said like a girl in love, though he couldn't have said why). Maybe a year ago, he said, he'd started to seriously consider that it was more than acting like one. Maybe half a year ago, he'd started to think if, maybe...

"Maybe if something about this was different," said Kolya.

If one of them were a woman. If they were both entirely human, nothing to do with Garou and their duties, if it was just the human world they had to worry about. If, if...

* * *

_February 1940_

"No matter how much you might love him right then," said Elias, "he won't be the only one. Keep that in mind. If you can't be with him as you want, it won't be the Apocalypse. There's nothing wrong just with feeling that way, but he won't be the only one in the world you could possibly be that way about. And I expect that somewhere out there there's at least one woman who could do the same thing to you." He hesitated, looked tentative, and then swept it out of his face with an impish grin. Aleksandr had thought of Golubev before; now he thought of Mikhail. "With your looks, I don't imagine you'll have any problems finding girls who'd _like _to."

* * *

_9 April 1934_

"All right," said Elias. "It can't last. All right. I understand. But..."

Kolya watched him, waiting. Outside, someone whooped once, short and sharp, before silence pressed back in.

"But," said Elias. "Couldn't it last... just for a little bit? It's not as if it's charach. What it _is _is, it's my name day." Though maybe it was past midnight by then. "Can't we pretend it's different? Just once?"

* * *

_February 1940_

"Well," said Elias, his grin fading, "that's about all I can tell you. I can't think of much else. Except that if anyone says you're some kind of a pervert, that something's wrong with you just because of that... I'm not saying you've got to go right up and kick their skulls in, because that's not always practical and some folk just don't know any better, but just remember that's complete nonsense. Promise me?"

"I promise." Here, now, it was easy to promise.

"Sergeant Laukkanen?" someone called, and Elias nodded at him and went off to whatever the soldiers required of him. Aleksandr returned his attention to the stitching.

Their father had taught them how to sew, back when you could get needles and thread in the regular stores. He was maybe eight then. Fyodor was enthusiastic but kept sticking himself with the needle until father took it away. He cried a while before wandering off to play with Masha Tkachenko. Mikhail was bored and kept saying, "Why? I'll just get married."

"Don't be so sure it'll work that way by the time you're of age," their father told him. "I wouldn't be so sure about getting married if you have that kind of attitude." It still mostly worked that way by the time they were of age, as it happened, but for a while it had seemed something might change in that way.

For practice, their father gave him his mother's coat with a tear in the lining. Aleksandr worked very slowly, very carefully, and when he was done his mother had made a great show of looking for where it had torn. He'd practiced a few more times, and then the shortages started and the sewing things they had left they put away for when it was really needed. He hadn't handled a needle and thread for years after that, until he was called up and found some in one of the special stores open to the military.

Everyone needed to make sacrifices. Once they'd overtaken the capitalists, it would be paid back ten times over. That part hadn't happened yet.

He remembered the surprised noises Elias made, how he kept asking about the shortages, the size of the lines, as if perpetually unsure he'd heard right. "I've been to Tampere and Viipuri," Elias had said. "I've never seen a line that long. Not _every day_."

To get anywhere, one had to make sacrifices. This was maybe part of why, though their lines weren't as long, so many of the Finns remained simple farmers (downtrodden ones, really?) while the Five-Year Plans brought forth massive constructions, the biggest of their kind, across the broad stretch of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This was why the Finnish army was so small and backward. But their little army was still dressed for the winter, dressed for the snow, and prepared for the forests.

Aleksandr remembered the olive and brown of their summer uniforms. He remembered the commanders in their sheepskin coats, warm and white. The shortage of these coats meant that when the White Finns could pick out such a man against the snow, they would know he was someone important and aim for him.

He thought about how many weeks it had been since Stalin's birthday.

He remembered again about Mandowska and Andriyenko and the rest. The cars going by in the night. Aunt Taisiya packing and unpacking her half-broken suitcase, leaving it propped by the door. "In case there's a fire," she said when Mikhail asked, not looking at him, looking over his shoulder. The trials, so many people, the showy ones for Zinoviev and Kamenev and Bukharin, the after-the-fact notice for Tukhachevsky, and that was just ones they had in the papers.

He remembered again about the pages pasted over, torn out.

He felt he was on the edge of something, a mountain or a precipice.

He had to pause for a minute when he was done, to figure out how to knot off the end. Once he'd worked something out, he turned Kyander's shirt right side out, examined it from that side - it seemed puckered compared to the seam around it, hopefully Kyander wouldn't mind - and folded it up. He'd return it tomorrow. Back to the books; by the time Elias returned, he'd finished "A Prisoner in the Caucasus," was part of the way into the story following. He thought of the speculation, still unanswered, that had led him to his first question tonight.

"Elias?"

"Yes?"

"Can I ask you something? Something personal?"

"You can always ask me whatever you'd like."

"I was wondering. Nikolay Viktorovich Rybalkin..."

"Yes?"

"Did you love him?"

* * *

_9 April 1934_

They moved into a far corner of the barn, leaving the lantern behind. Elias, graceless tonight, fumbled at the buttons of Kolya's trousers, fumbled for the knotted string of his drawers, pressed his mouth to Kolya's neck.

The Rybalkins were great kissers. It was the Russian way of doing things, he thought. Masha and Valya and Lyudmila kissed each other and their Russian girl friends; Kolya kissed friends like Dima. In Elias's village no one else kissed as readily, as openly; Fenrir in particular weren't given to it. The sight of these kisses often gave him a small guilty frisson, especially since he knew they didn't mean them the way he saw them and _especially _not with family. In memory of this, he pushed himself up and moved his mouth to Kolya's cheek.

Kolya was all variations of shadows; the touch was the important thing. It was Kolya's hand cupping his cheek that guided their mouths together. It wasn't like Elias had expected. Drier, maybe, the feeling of Kolya's lips against his. When he went further his tongue bumped into Kolya's teeth. Completely graceless. But Elias still wanted, wanted so much to pretend that it would last.

* * *

_February 1940_

"Kolya? Oh, yes. Yes. I did love him. Was I that obvious?"

Aleksandr said nothing.

"He was always more sensible than I was," said Elias. "Especially about this sort of thing." He fell back against the wall again. "We did it once. On my name day. Just to know what it would've been like. We agreed that would be it."

"... was it?"

"It was. Yes, I know, I was surprised too." This laugh was soft, rueful. "I thought maybe I could persuade him into more once he knew what it felt like. Well, I didn't. One thing he was too sensible about was, after that, he said that maybe I could marry Valya or Masha instead. They're all right but I didn't like them the same way, didn't _love _them the same way," which Aleksandr had already guessed at from the way his tone shifted between them, "and it would've been too close to see anything but him. They ought to have better than that. And they did get better than that."

"That's good."

"Yes, it is. So, that was it for Kolya. We write, back and forth. I'll have to tell him about this sometime."

"About what?"

"Oh, well," another of those soft laughs, "not _everything_. Just that I met a man at the front that put me in mind of him."

"Do you think so?"

"I think so. In some ways, at least. Tall and dark and Russian and gutsy and handsome enough to make the Snow Queen long to carry him off."

And unattainable. Aleksandr shifted about, uncomfortable under the sharp light of these words. "You're very... direct."

"After what happened when I hoped for it to slide by..."

"I don't think anyone's called me handsome before."

"You're at your best when you're gutsy. It's not just the shapes of your face, it's an attitude that shows it to best advantage. And the Silver Fangs bred for handsomeness, I think, as a sideline." A silence. "Like I said, nothing like that's going to happen. I swear on the jaws of Great Fenris. Don't fret about it."

"I won't." For quite some time it hadn't occurred to him to fret about it.

"I'd say to think of me as an older brother, but I don't know if that quite goes together the right way."

Aleksandr nodded. To imagine his brothers harboring incestuous fantasies, let alone stating them so bluntly, was a far more disturbing thought.

"But if something about this was different," said Elias, and stopped.

So many things would have to be different, then. One of them would have to be a woman, at least one of them wouldn't be Garou, it would help very much to be born on the same side of a border, and he supposed being a prisoner, in name or in fact, would always put another cast to things whether or not they noticed outright... "I don't know. Maybe." 


End file.
